From: Austin Ziegler <austin@...>
Date: 2002-11-27T09:55:05+09:00
Subject: Re: The names of a method

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On Wed, 27 Nov 2002 08:54:07 +0900, Yukihiro Matsumoto wrote:
> caller(0) may help.
> 
> % ri caller
[...]
> Returns the current execution stack---an array containing=
 strings
> in the form ``file:line'' or ``file:line: in `method'''. The
> optional anInteger parameter determines the number of initial
> stack entries to omit from the result.
[...]
> c(0)  #=3D> ["prog:2:in `a'", "prog:5:in `b'", "prog:8:in `c'", 
"prog:10"]
> c(1)  #=3D> ["prog:5:in `b'", "prog:8:in `c'", "prog:11"]
> c(2)  #=3D> ["prog:8:in `c'", "prog:12"]
> c(3)  #=3D> ["prog:13"]

I use caller(0) in one of the functions that I've translated, and=
 I
have to say that I really don't like it for a few reasons. I've=
 only
just identified the core reason that I don't like it. It returns=
 an
Array of Strings, which then have to be parsed in one of two
optional forms.

Shouldn't it return an Array of Calls, where a Call contains the
same information as is in the string and, in fact, has a #to_s=
 that
outputs in the same form as what we see above? Right now, I=
 can't
interact with the results of Caller in an "intuitively" OO=
 fashion,
like I can (just about) with everything else in Ruby.

I just quickly created a simulation of it with the attached
caller.rb file, but I think that this should probably be the way
that Caller works. I'm sure there are other things that=
 could/should
be added, but I shouldn't have to "parse" the string manually=
 every
time I want to deal with caller. Most of the time, I just want=
 to
know the name of the method that called the current method.

Note that for the replacement to caller that I'm incrementing=
 the
caller parameter by one; this is so that the fact that there's=
 one
more level of indirection present is hidden.

-austin
-- Austin Ziegler, austin@halostatue.ca on 2002.11.26 at=
 19.07.57

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