Re: Java vs. Objective-C for Cocoa

FROM : Ondra Cada
DATE : Sun Apr 24 15:55:32 2005

Marcel,

On 24.4.2005, at 13:04, Marcel Weiher wrote:

> The fact that some people have been exposed to refactoring in
> statically typed environment means they will give examples from that
> environment.  It does not mean that refactoring or refactoring tools
> are tied to that sort of environment.


All right. So, just show us an example of what a smart re-factoring
tool in ObjC can do considerably better than regexp search&replace. So
much better it is worth to be implemented.

Many times I've pointed out that *I do not know* about such
functionality, not that it does not exist.

> Once again, the simple fact that the Refactoring Browser originiated
> in Smalltalk, which has no static type information at all (unlike
> Objective-C), should be a STRONG hint to you that you are barking up
> the wrong tree...


Sorry, but it's *you* who is barking a wrong tree -- since it's the
static type-based tools we are speaking of here, with an *explicit*
disclaimer there can be different re-factoring tools which are not
subject of this debate (and which I would like to have).

The reason I've written my messages was to show that (and why) the
static type-based re-factoring cannot be automated in ObjC reasonably.
*Never* I said re-factoring can't be done at all (though I did say I
don't see a way better than regexp myself). See eg. the (IIRC) first
message of mine in this thread:

On 23.4.2005, at 22:29, Ondra Cada wrote:

> And of course, re-factoring *is* a tedious work, and it would be
> *great* to have an automatic support for it. Alas, the way of the
> strong-typed Java without a reflection (or with so little of it that
> you can afford to ignore it) just can't be used efficiently in a
> dynamic system, which hugely exploits meta-programming techniques.
> Perhaps a better way can be found...

---
Ondra Èada
OCSoftware:    <email_removed>              http://www.ocs.cz
private        <email_removed>            http://www.ocs.cz/oc