From: Justin Collins <collinsj@...>
Date: 2006-08-23T07:39:39+09:00
Subject: Re: Static typing ain't so bad, after all...

Leslie Viljoen wrote:
> On 8/22/06, Just Another Victim of the Ambient Morality
> <ihatespam@rogers.com> wrote:
>
>>     In my example, "node" is a parameter and an object, not a method 
>> name.
>> It's curt but it's not entirely a bad name, as long as it is a node of
>> something that has nodes.  It could be more expressive but just as my
>> example demonstrated (the context that you trimmed in your response), 
>> it's
>> hard to expand on it.  You could say what type of structure it is a node
>> for but that doesn't help that much unless you're intimately familiar 
>> with
>> that structure.  In my case, what would really have helped is if I 
>> can find
>> the definition of one of these nodes that will be passed in (so that 
>> I may
>> become intimately familiar with that structure).  In my case, I think 
>> there
>> is only one type that will ever be passed into this function but, of
>> course, that's hard to tell...
>
> Almost anyone can write hard to understand code in any language - I
> try to comment anything that might be unclear in the code I'm writing.
> Particularly I maintain a lot of C# code where arb names are invented
> for objects, making it hard to guess their function.
>
> But you are right that it's normally easy to determine the structure
> of objects passed to functions in C# - normally as easy as
> "right-click->go to definition". Since most of my Ruby functions get
> called with only certain objects as parameters, I wonder if a clever
> text search wouldn't be able to guess at those objects. Of course,
> just looking at the function it would be impossible to tell, but a
> clever search might be able to see:
>
>
> def PrintMarks(marks)
>
> has been called only by:
> PrintMarks(marks)
>
> and above that is:
>
> marks = markSheet[0]
>
> and somewhere before that is:
>
> markSheet[0] = StudentMarkTable.new
>
> etc.
>
> Of course it might not be worth the effort to write such a thing, I
> have certainly not needed it badly enough.
>
> Les

But it kinda sounds like a fun project...hmmmmmm....

-Justin