Re: Refactoring tools available for Cocoa / ObjC?
Re: Refactoring tools available for Cocoa / ObjC?
- Subject: Re: Refactoring tools available for Cocoa / ObjC?
- From: Ondra Cada <email@hidden>
- Date: Wed, 3 May 2006 19:14:45 +0200
Eric,
On 2.5.2006, at 22:47, Eric Lin wrote:
That can be done as a hint (and may even perhaps be useable as such),
but you'd have to keep remembering that it's no more than a hint (for
actually each time the program runs the returned value *can* be of a
different class).
Or perhaps what could be done in such ambiguous case is to simply
point out the ambiguity to the developer, and ask the developer to
manually refactor. This is acceptable (to me at least) given that the
number of ambiguous cases is rare.
the problem is that you have to understand this ambiguity applies in
*ALL*, again **ALL** cases. Even if the analysis haven't encountered
that ambiguity in one, or a hundred, or a million times, it can still
easily be there, just happened to be unnoticed.
That's exactly what I am disagreeing in with Greg or Marcel: not that
a "smart re-factoring tool" cannot bring nice services, far from
that! But, a lot (and regarding the average level of questions in
this list lately I mean **a lot**) of programmers would assume the
tool *does* change in a behaviour-preserving way, and use it as if it
did. Then they would be in for a nasty surprise. For the tool,
whatever well designed, can never achieve that goal. Definitely not
in ObjC/Cocoa, it can be very close to it (save for reflexion tricks)
in Java, can't say how reliable it is in Smalltalk.
Perhaps the difference is just in emphasizing and names: all right,
give us the features, but call them "smart find&replace" or whatever,
or at most "re-factoring support", but not "re-factoring tool". For
the tool would not re-factor: *you* would (using its services all
right, but as soon as you presume *the tool* re-factors, you are SOL).
---
Ondra Čada
OCSoftware: email@hidden http://www.ocs.cz
private email@hidden http://www.ocs.cz/oc
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