Re: Class/method organization

Daniel Bonniot wrote:

>
> If I understand well, your concern is that in a large project, it 
> becomes hard to locate methods and understand the class hierarchy. It 
> is even more so with the added flexibility of multi-methods.
>
> I think this is a valid concern. Some convention about how to group 
> methods in files can help, and you are free to apply one. However, 
> this will never be completely satisfactory, because there are several 
> ways to group information:
>
> * see the class hierchy as a set of trees
> * see all the methods related to a certain class (not just as the 
> first argument)
> * see all the implementations of a certain method
> * ...
>
> Since the organization of your projects in packages and files is 
> static, it might help you with one of those, but then the others are 
> still hard to get. This means you will always need tools that present 
> you with the information in a different view. Therefore, I think 
> energy would be better spent on improving the tools in this direction. 
> Nicedoc could help, and an IDE should be able to browse and edit your 
> code switching between those views. We need help to work on those...


I agree there is several way to do. And my suggestion is to choose one 
for static files and package organisation and avoid mixe.
Currently there is no NiceDoc and IDE for Nice, and the only tool is 
FileSystem navigation. Note that some time it's the only tool also for 
Java and other language (throught CVSWeb,...). Yesterday I start to 
explore NiceDoc source and my first reaction was were is the 
implementation of this class/method/function, idem when I go into the 
source of Nice to search for AST, Document,...



-------------------------------------------------------
SF.Net email is sponsored by: Discover Easy Linux Migration Strategies
from IBM. Find simple to follow Roadmaps, straightforward articles,
informative Webcasts and more! Get everything you need to get up to
speed, fast. http://ads.osdn.com/?ad_id=7477&alloc_id=16492&op=click