From: "Brett H. Williams" <brett_williams@...>
Date: 2003-08-07T03:27:11+09:00
Subject: Re: newbie question from a smalltalker

On Aug  7, Michael Garriss wrote:
> Lyle Johnson wrote:
> 
> >Michael Garriss wrote:
> >
> >>Although I can't test it in my current enviroment, I believe that 
> >>ctags works on ruby too.  Sure it's a bit dumb (ctags) but combined 
> >>with vim or emacs it can be quite useful.
> >
> >
> >Actually, I can confirm it ;) I use the CodeBrowser (I think that's 
> >its name) plugin for JEdit and it uses ctags under the hood to 
> >generate the list of classes, methods etc. for the current file. Works 
> >pretty well for Ruby, although the method names are not 
> >fully-qualified (i.e. no distinction between "A::foo" and "B::foo", 
> >both appear as "foo"). Not sure if this latter problem is a defect of 
> >ctags or of CodeBrowser's use of the ctags file information.
> >
> >
> >
> Yea...If I remember right, ctags was much better at some languages then 
> if was at others.   I believe there is a version of ctags out there that 
> is open source.  It would be interesting to rewrite it in ruby and then 
> add on the power of rubyish things...like ObjectSpace.  If it produced 
> output in the same format as ctags it would still plug-in to 3rd-party 
> tools.

The ctags version that is Open Source is Exuberant ctags, which supports
all kinds of things.  I use it for my projects.

I believe it is an exuberant ctags limitation, as I don't get class or
namespace scoping when using it with C++.

I used to use rtags but it was terribly slow.  I'm not sure a ruby
implementation will be any speedier.