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in reply to •Re: Re: •Re: Self-improvement and TMTOWTDI
in thread Self-improvement and TMTOWTDI

The true IDE thing, please ghod, give it to me now. I think I can get an awful lot of what's needed to support a Smalltalk browser in Perl 5, but the introspection involved is, frankly painful. One of my fondest hopes for Perl 6 is that the Perl level introspection capabilities will be at least as powerful as perl 5's but with nicer interfaces.
  • Comment on Re: •Re: Re: •Re: Self-improvement and TMTOWTDI

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Re^5: Self-improvement and TMTOWTDI
by adrianh (Chancellor) on Jan 25, 2003 at 00:23 UTC

    I second that.

    What would make me really happy is if perl6 would give us enough introspection abilities to make a perl refactoring browser that wasn't an insane hack of special cases.

[reply]
      You've seen Preface (PERl REFACtoring Engine) then? I still can't quite believe that I got the Extract Method refactoring working. The way it works is utterly evil, but it is possible (and, AFAICT from the spike I did) should work in many cases.

      Detecting the lexical variables involved in a code segment by repeatedly evaling and modifying the same section of code based on $@ until compiles successfully is, frankly, weird. Especially when, to get things to be compiled in the right context you had to do some magic with coderefs in @INC.

      Once I've got Pixie good and stable, I really should go and revisit Preface...

[reply]
        You've seen Preface (PERl REFACtoring Engine) then?

        Actually no - where is it (the sourceforge page doesn't appear to have any code)?

        I'd just played around with writing my own for a day or so a few years back, but the code rapidly became too evil for my tastes :-)

[reply]

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