From: Florian Gross <flgr@...>
Date: 2005-03-30T21:54:46+09:00
Subject: Re: Open letter to anyone developing a Ruby IDE

Shajith wrote:

>>        a = somemethod(1, 2, 3)
>>        a.<TAB> # what methods are available? We have an approximation of
>>                # the classes/methods in the system, but no idea what
>>                # `a' corresponds to.
>>                #
>>                # You could use "Foo.new is an 'atomic' type constraint,
>>                # everything else bubbles up from these kind of constraints",
>>                # but how reliable would that be?
>>
> What about the IDE doing eval("a.methods")? Won't that cover the
> general <expr>.<TAB> case?

What if a is `rm -rf /`? It might not always be possible to execute code 
as it might have side effects which I think is also the reason for IRB's 
rather simplistic method completion...