I am not sure how they have done it, but EPIC for Eclipse sometimes does figure out what methods a given object has, so it must somehow be possible to provide a kind of tool that suits your needs.

Most likely using the generic out of the box solution: ctags!

Cheers Rolf

Thanks, this helps for renaming packages/classes. What about methods?

It isn't the perfect solution, but my best friend when it comes to changing parameter list and/or renaming Perl methods is the bash command:

find ... -print0 | xargs -0 grep 'mymethodname'
-or-
find ... -print0 | xargs -0 grep -l 'mymethodname'
[download]

I use the first when I want to find all the files and lines containing my method name. I use the second when I just want to see which files have such lines. If you aren't familiar with the commands:

• find recursively searches for files. It has a rich set of options you can use to screen out files you aren't interested in. The -print0 option uses the null character to separate file names so you don't have to worry about quoting file names with spaces.
• xargs passes the file list produced by find to grep. The -0 argument tells xargs to expect a null delimited file list.
• grep - most likely you are familiar with this, but it selects lines containing a regex you provide. If you only want to see the file names, but not the lines, use the -l option.

With all the find options, the command line can be quite long so I usually run it in a shell where I can keep history. That way I can simply recall the command via history, changing the method name as needed.

Best, beth

That means you can extend each class you use with information (eg an array or flagging them with attributes) about the method names.

Then you can get the information which classes use which methods without running the class-code.

Well you can easily do this with your own code... and I suppose you don't plan changing method names of foreign classes...

BUT then you still have the problem to identify statically which class an object belongs to. An object in Perl is just a blessed reference to a data structure. A reference might have been created from somewhere without any "new class" syntax in the same file to parse.

So you have to enrich your code with type-declarations (should be possible with attributes)

So it's possible (you will be mimicking the mechanisms of static languages) but is this still perl???

There are plenty of discussions of this in Perlmonks (search for static parsing and ppi), you might want to check if IDE-extensions like perlysense for emacs or padre already provide any automated help.

UPDATE: (1) reliable

Module::Inspector, Class::Inspector

> Module::Inspector, Class::Inspector

well yes, AFAIK these are ppi spin-offs and Gabor's approach for padre.

But if the OP is only talking about self-written classes and compares to java he might be happy about a robust attribute¹ based solution instead of relying on ppi's "guessing what the author meant".

BTW: How do these modules handle AUTOLOAD?

Cheers Rolf

UPDATE: (1) Attribute::Handlers