From: Ben Giddings <ben@...>
Date: 2003-08-07T00:59:58+09:00
Subject: Re: newbie question from a smalltalker

On Wed August 6 2003 11:02 am, Robert Klemme wrote:
> Yep, apart from the fact that you won't find the senders - which is a
> quite important thing to know.  The closes you can get is a script that
> wades through the sources and prints out all occurrences of "<any
> identifier>.<method name>"; you would only miss those cases where some
> instance invokes the method on itself - but these are easy to find anyway.
> 
> Other than that it'll be difficult because of the dynamic typing of the
> language.  You can't determine from "foo.size()" whether it's the size
> method of class Array or String - which is a bit of a difference.

For what it's worth, I think a tool that could do what Adriano's asking for 
would be incredibly useful, if only as a learning tool.  Years and years ago, 
when I was first learning Java, I had a copy of the first edition of Java in 
a Nutshell.  One of the best features of the book were some indices at the 
back that listed (in dead-tree format) exactly this sort of information.  If 
I remember correctly, they might have even had an index of where certain 
classes were used as function parameters.

What made this great as a learning tool was that you could easily find 
examples of how a certain function was used, or quickly find all the 
different IO classes that could do what you were trying to do.

Sometime I'll have to get around to playing with Smalltalk and see how it 
works there.

Ben