From: Lothar Scholz Date: 2003-06-24T01:16:15+09:00 Subject: Re: editor / ide recommentation on Windows > Really? Why do you say that? I find it interesting that the first > language for which refactoring was implemented was Smalltalk, which one First there is a significant difference between Ruby and Smalltalk/Lisp. The latter is an "image" language. You don't need statistic code analyser to find the classes methods etc. You just use introspection on the Class class. So some problems are eliminated. Second, from what you write i think you have not seen the refactoring browser of Smalltalk yet. It is also not more then a good context sensitive grep. You can never be sure that a refactoring keeps integrity. For the most useful refactorings it is very easy to create a 99,99% perfect refactoring tool in Java and other statical typed languages. But also impossible to do it Smalltalk. For example the often used "rename method" refactoring does present you a list of results to which you have to confirm that they are really right method calls. Some dynamically dispatched methods are obmitted from this list.