From: Alan Chen <alan@...>
Date: 2002-05-01T04:13:06+09:00
Subject: Re: Source File/Class relationship - the Ruby way

On Tue, Apr 30, 2002 at 10:38:10PM +0900, Volkmann, Mark wrote:
> I imagine this has been discussed in the past on this mailing list, but I'd
> appreciate a brief explanation of why it's good to define multiple classes
> in a single source file.  Using grep to find classes seems very tedious. 

There's nothing preventing you from putting one class per file in your
code.  I know many C++ projects that do just that -- a few ruby
projects too.  If you have a lot of small classes, sometimes it makes
more sense to group all the classes in one module and call the file
<module>.rb. Other times, ruby is employed in single file scripts
(with multiple classes).  Forcing the standard of one class per file
would be very annoying for these uses.

Have you looked at rdoc? It will let you jump to code definitions via
a browser (in additon to extracting and assembling inline
documentation) Or if you use emacs, you can use tags to jump to the
definition of classes. (Vi too, I'm sure).

Heck, if it really bothers you that much, you could write a utility to
parse through ruby code and rewrite it into a new standardized tree of
your preferred convention. The rdoc utility I mentioned earlier might
be a good place to start - as it has code to do ruby code parsing too.

-- alan

-- 
Alan Chen
Digikata LLC
http://digikata.com