Saturday, November 03, 2007

Giles Bowkett: IRB: What Was That Method Again?

Giles Bowkett: IRB: What Was That Method Again?

Well, #methods is a good start. But it doesn't capture the method_missings. This shows just the power as well as the shortcoming of ruby and rails: You can't look everything up, you need to know some parts.

On another note, I'm just working on a small code generator that turns a protocol spec (of a proprietary thing) into java classes that offers the protocol commands as connection object methods. It's actually the same thing: We decided for the code generator, because that way, the IDE can show what is there; were we using annotations, this wouldn't be possible and things more dynamic. This isn't the whole cause; performance (as of exceptions, not primarily reflection) also played a role.

Still, I'd rather like to do the generation within the java compiler, which would save us some subclassing.

The generator itself is not in java, but in haskell, because of parsec, and generally to do some actual hacking in haskell. I like it; it is very nice when you change some definition and the compiler tells you the places you need to adapt.