On 2013-02-10, at 17:42, Frank Shearar <frank.shearar@gmail.com> wrote:

On 10 February 2013 16:25, Camillo Bruni <camillobruni@gmail.com> wrote:

Why does SystemNavigation >> #allSelect: return strings of the form 'Array at:' instead of the real methods?

Probably because the things that use SystemNavigation - Browsers,
MessageSets and the like - want to render lists of things to the user.

There is one advantage to dumb strings, which is that it's easy to
make a SystemNavigation that works against a remote image. But that's
not much to go on. Changing these kinds of methods to return
MethodReferences might be a useful middle ground (and permit easy
extension to remote tools).

I mention remote tools because I hacked up a proof of concept a while
back that turned a Browser into one that could access a suitably
prepared image through an HTTP API. Development stalled because the
reflection machinery's API is a bit... involved, and it was dog slow,
but I could browse anything I liked. I should really wrap up the work
a bit so I can spread the love.

we have RBMethodDefinitions now, which are almost polymorphic to CompiledMethod
when it comes to all inspection / reflection accesses.

So I guess we can change that in 3.0 at some point to no longer return silly strings...