[Moose-dev] Re: Class Extensions

Ciao Alex, Currently an extended method has its own packagedIn which is different than its class's packagedIn. So the informatoin about the package in which the extension resides is there, just not explicit. What you propose with the association is a step further towards clarity by making the relationship an entity. What I was thinking about was a step even further. Making both the 'relationship' and the 'class extension' entities. Like this: FAMIXClass subclass: #FAMIXClassExtension instanceVariableNames: '' classVariableNames: '' and FAMIXAssociation subclass: #FAMIXExtensionRelationship instanceVariableNames: 'extended extension' classVariableNames: '' poolDictionaries: '' category: 'Famix-Core' - extended would point to a FAMIXClass - extension would point to a FAMIXClassExtension This former approach sees a class extension as a class-like entity which contains the extended methods. The advantage is that this makes dependency analysis more uniform. We then can treat extended methods just like normal methods when aggregating invocations from the method level to the package level. For example: aMEthod belongsTo packagedIn will give us the package in which the method was defined, independently of wether it is an extension or not. One thing which I think will be easier this way is visualizing extension relationships. Generating a polymetric view of the dependencies between two packages like the one in the figure will be straightforward since we have entities for both the extensions and the original classes. Does my point make sense? Cheers, Mircea.