From: Curt Hibbs <curt@...>
Date: 2003-08-14T03:39:40+09:00
Subject: Re: AW: [ann] AEditor 0.10, folding added

Lothar Scholz wrote:
>
> Hello Simon,
>
> Tuesday, August 12, 2003, 10:44:49 PM, you wrote:
>
> SS> also IntelliJ-Idea has many nice features which I hope
> AEditor will get.
> SS> http://www.intellij.com/idea/
> SS> examples of its features [ripped from intelliJ's feature list]:
> SS> * rename method, The renaming functionality allows you to rename any
> SS>   package, class, method or variable and automatically finds
> and corrects
> SS>   all references to it.
> SS> * Moving classes and packages with reference correction.
> SS> * extract method, Select a block of code and invoke Extract Method to
> SS>   turn it into a method. It will automatically analyze the code to
> SS>   detect which variables of the original method must be passed to the
> SS>   extracted method as parameters.
> SS> * etc.. 30 refactoring operations ..
>
> SS> If we had an IDE for Ruby with such features... wow.
> SS> I will do my best in order to create such refactoring tools for ruby.
>
> Have you ever spend more then a few minutes to think about the
> problems with refactoring in script languages and especially with
> ruby ?
>
> I guess you didn't.
>
> The fexibility of languages like ruby makes it impossible to ever
> write something like intellij. And it is not a parser problem. I can
> write a full ruby parser in a weekend, but this would give me no clue
> about the behaviour.

The problem is harder in a dynamically typed language like Ruby, but not
impossible. You can't take it quite as far as you can in a strongly typed
language like Java, but you *can* implement a surprising amount of
functionality. You only need to look as far as the existing Smalltalk
refactoring tools to see just what can be done.

Curt