From: Laurent Julliard <Laurent.Julliard@...>
Date: 2002-01-14T17:48:06+09:00
Subject: Re: Small Methods - a ramble

Curt Hibbs wrote:

Over the last decade I have use many different development
> environments. In these development environments there are several
> predominant forms of code navigation and editing, that I believe can
> synergistically coexist in a single IDE.
> 
> = Flat File =
> 
> Not much to say here. This is your basic textpad style editing where you see
> everything that is in a single file and your only form of navigation is
> moving up and down in the file and searching. Very primitive. A useful
> addition to this is the ability right-click on a symbol in the code and get
> a context menu that lets you go to its definition.
> 
> = Collapsible Text =
> 
> This is a very nice addition to flat file editing. Intelligent parsing can
> allow the text to be collapsed at particular code points (usually method and
> class definitions). A very flexible adhoc use of collapsible text is when
> you are allowed to collapse text sections based on the matches of a regular
> expression. CodeWright (which I mentioned above) does all of this.
> 
> = Browsing =
> 
> This is where you are allowed to view the code in your project based on the
> logical entities that it contains (classes, methods, modules) instead of its
> rather arbitrary physical storage (files). There are several ways to present
> this, but they all boil down to essentially the same thing.
> 
> There is a hierarchy of names: classes/modules by inheritance/mixin which
> contain methods. When you click on one of these names, the editor should
> show that entity's definition, ready for editing. The name hierarchy can be
> displayed in the form of a collapsible tree control, or in classic Smalltalk
> panes. The display pane that shows code for editing can contain only that
> particular entity (Smalltalk style) or could be the entire file containing
> that entity with the selected entity visible for editing (and perhaps the
> rest of the file slightly "grayed" to visually distinguish the selected
> entity).
> 
> I particularly like the this last approach because it lets me navigate
> logically, but easily see the physical organization without any additional
> effort. This is also the form that is most natural for non-Smalltalkers as
> it takes what they are use to (editing physical files) and layers onto that
> the capability to navigate using the names of the logical entities in their
> code.
> 
> Also, there are many possible types of logical navigation panes: class
> hierarchy, reverse class hierarchy, "uses of <some-entity>", etc.
> 


Building on Ron's remark I too do tend to have either large methods with 
comment in it because it makes it easier to follow the "story". 
Splitting the code in many small pieces which I do as well is really 
when either you know the code very well and the code browser is actually 
in your brain or you have a powerful and convenient browsing tool at 
hand (I still haven't found one personally and stick to Emacs. Which is 
why I want FreeRIDE to be innovative in this area)

So it looks like we have a sort of a dilema here between reading a story 
  (like we read a novel in a book) and looking at the structure of the 
story (like we read a table of content and possibly the index).If we 
push the book analogy one step further there is another thing we could 
do which is a variant of the = Collapsible Text = describe by Curt above.

The idea is to have the ability to flatten a method in place.  In other 
words it would give you the ability to substitute a method call in a 
given piece of code by the code of the method itself (possibly doing 
clever substitution argument names). And you could do this recursively 
of course so that from a highly fragmented series of methods you can at 
any given time flatten the code and read the story in-line.

It is exactly like if you were given a table of content of a book and 
had the ability to expand any of the chapter section, sub-section and 
substitute them with the content for a while to read the story.

I don't know if this kind of tool is already available is some IDE and 
I'd be glad to here your comments about that.

Laurent