On Wed, 2003-08-13 at 14:03, Lothar Scholz wrote: > 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. This is an interesting assertion considering that the original refactoring browser was written for Smalltalk which certainly is no slouch when it comes to flexibility. So I would guess that a number of refactorings would be possible, certainly enough to be useful. I can see certain refactorings being more difficult in a Duck Typed language, e.g. renaming a method (how do you if *this* use of a method is one to be changed). Here's a question to folks that have used both the Smalltalk refactoring browser and one of the Java IDEs (e.g. IntelliJ or Eclipse): In what ways did refactoring support differ between the two languages? -- -- Jim Weirich jweirich / one.net http://onestepback.org ----------------------------------------------------------------- "Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it." -- Donald Knuth (in a memo to Peter van Emde Boas)