From: Daniel Berger <djberg96@...>
Date: 2006-06-11T23:17:31+09:00
Subject: Getting a list of aliases

Hi all,

Is there a way to get a list of instance method aliases somehow?

# Hypothetical syntax
Array.instance_method_aliases # ['size', 'map', ...]

If not, I think it would be a nice little bit of extra inspection I 
could use in certain situations, like when I'm in irb and feeling too 
lazy to look at the documentation. ;)

Actually, this idea struck me when I tried to figure out just the "core" 
methods for a given class and wanted to exclude the aliases.  At the 
time, I had to view the source code directly and count them.  This 
proved more difficult than I thought, because sometimes methods would 
redefine functions with different names rather than use 
rb_define_alias() in the source code.

To give you an example of what I mean, in array.c the Array#map function 
is not declared using rb_define_alias(), but is simply mapped (no pun 
intended) to a different function:

rb_define_method(rb_cArray, "collect", rb_ary_collect, 0);
rb_define_method(rb_cArray, "map", rb_ary_collect, 0);

Thoughts?

- Dan