Re: Category or Protocol? (sidetrack)

FROM : Rick Kitts
DATE : Thu Apr 21 14:12:22 2005

On Apr 21, 2005, at 1:32 AM, Dirk van Oosterbosch wrote:

> How intelligent do you want your editor to be?


As "intelligent" as it can be :-)

> Since Obj-C can be weakly typed ...
>
> If you have:
>
> id someObject;
> // does something to set that to be an instance of some class you or
> the editor don't know.
> [someObject foo];
>
>
> Then if you change your -foo method in ClassA to be
> -fooWithFlag:(BOOL)yesOrNo, do you expect your editor to change this
> above code to:


No. The thing to keep in mind is that the intelligent editors are
nothing more than very
specialized databases. So what I would expect an editor to do in this
case is to simply point out the potential for a need for a change.
Something like "select * from invocations where name=foo and class
implements fooOwnerClass or class = 'id'", present me the result set,
let me pick includes and apply a transform.

I will wager  dollars to donuts though, that if there was an IDE for
cocoa/objc that did what IntelliJ/Eclipse did people would quickly
modify their coding styles to better inform the editor what's going on.

We should let this drop since it's not cocoa at all, but let me finish
by saying that intelligent editing is the second most valuable
programming tool/idiom/whatever I've come across in 20 years of coding.
It's truly useful.

---Rick