[ruby-talk:6203] Re: Thoughts on a Ruby browser

On Fri, 10 Nov 2000, Conrad Schneiker/Austin/Contr/IBM wrote:

> #   A parser for Ruby source code, extracts classes, methods, and
> #   reference locations.
> 
> Is this something that a Ruby 1.7+ option could provide in a more 
> convenient and "off-the-shelf" form?

Matz would have to provide the answer to this one, but it would be
great to have it there, for sure! :)

> Ruby itself has no builtin IDE vocabulary and expertise as it were.

Ah, yes, you're right. You did a most accurate job of summarising
my notes, which were taken over the span of a couple of years. :)

> Does anyone know of any relevant/notable systems around whose
> architecture would be worth studying in connection with R.IDE?

Source Navigator, Visual C++ and quite a few IDEs make moves in the
direction of being code aware, and I've heard of a system called
Blue that is a research tool that does a limited subset of this.

I haven't seen any tools that implement the graphical interface to
such an extent, but I haven't found any show-stoppers when thinking
about how to implement this. It should be pretty straightforwards,
other than the parsing.

Ruby could be a difficult case. I have no idea how we can retrieve
function calls and references as this is determined at run-time. It
would get icky having to run the program to find out what things
are, with Dumpers churning away in the background. :)

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