Comment So what's new? (Score 2, Interesting) 208
Hmm... most of what he talks about has been available in proper languages for decades! I'll even try, as a public service, not to mention LISP :]
Smalltalk has this:
(3/5) class methodDictionary at: #+
which will give you the + method for the Fraction class. From that object (the CompiledMethod) you can get the original source code (if it's available), or a parse tree. The parse tree will give you indices into the original source, in case you should need to do a GUI for your IDE :)
Say you're writing a debugger (which you can actually do, unlike in Java, where the debugger needs to run externally).. the MethodContext knowns at what opcode execution stopped, the parse tree knows which part of the source that represents. This means you can step operator by operator through an exression... no "line numbers".
You can *fake* some of these things in java, but it's not pretty - something like IntelliJ has to use its own special compiler and huge amounts of support code, and it's just plain impossible in Java for a system to debug itself.
Go play: free-as-in-beer-for-personal-use and nice / free, cute, fluffy and sluggish
</preach>
Smalltalk has this:
(3/5) class methodDictionary at: #+
which will give you the + method for the Fraction class. From that object (the CompiledMethod) you can get the original source code (if it's available), or a parse tree. The parse tree will give you indices into the original source, in case you should need to do a GUI for your IDE
Say you're writing a debugger (which you can actually do, unlike in Java, where the debugger needs to run externally).. the MethodContext knowns at what opcode execution stopped, the parse tree knows which part of the source that represents. This means you can step operator by operator through an exression... no "line numbers".
You can *fake* some of these things in java, but it's not pretty - something like IntelliJ has to use its own special compiler and huge amounts of support code, and it's just plain impossible in Java for a system to debug itself.
Go play: free-as-in-beer-for-personal-use and nice / free, cute, fluffy and sluggish
</preach>
