I don’t think this is built in, but maybe I’m wrong. I was wondering
how, if this isn’t built in, we might add the ability when pretty
printing a class/modules list of methods we might have the name of the
file where the method was defined.
That is instead of:
pp ActiveRecord.methods.sort
…
“tainted?”,
“to_a”,
“to_json”,
…
We’d get something like:
pp ActiveRecord.methods_with_origination_info.sort
…
“tainted?” (/usr/lib/…),
“to_a” (/some/path/to/this/file/…),
“to_json” (/path/info/…),
…
Even more useful if it could somehow tell me that it was included via a
mixin or via inheritance, etc.:
…
“to_a” (/some/path/to/this/file/…) mixed in from Array,
“bogus_method” (/some/path/to/this/file/…) inherited from Bogus,
…
Obviously, this is bogus sample info., however, it makes my point.
This kind of information would make it easier to know where to go to
look up documentation, especially during debugging/programming. Right
now when listing all methods for an object or class, the list returned
is overwhelming. I can’t easily tell what methods are native and which
ones got plastered on during a very dynamic load and from where they
came. Or perhaps some other API is more desirable:
#native_methods
#mixed_in_methods
#inherited_methods
It would be useful to gather the same information about instance
variables, though this is a lesser concern.
I suspect this could be handled with either callbacks or aspect-oriented
programming. I would also suppose this could be done by using
“included_modules” or “ancestors” and accessing their methods to
appropriately tag who owns what; however, I’m thinking this won’t be
exact as it should be possible during multiple mixins for a method to be
overridden more than once. This would through into question ownership,
that is unless the “included_modules” or “ancestors” returns the order
of mixin. Also, this doesn’t handle inheritance.
Having this sort of information would be vastly helpful. The main
drawback of Ruby is the lack of a power IDE that makes available just
this sort of information. I know there are some that have come a long
way (NetBeans??) but right now I basically use gedit and a terminal
console.
Any thoughts or guidance? Something I’ve overlooked?
Thanks for any advice.
Mario T. Lanza
