I think the answer my lie in the general case and no one tried to address the complexity of the problem. Consider an API that's implemented in a number of classes, classes which may not be in a hierarchy. Let's use #ifNil: as an example. Some implementers use the argument and others don't, so you cannot criticise the methods that don't. It's much more difficult to recognize whether methods with the same name actually implement the same API or are entirely independent of each other. That being said, one could quite easily create a criticized for the special case of a single method, lacking any other implementations, that doesn't use it's argument. On Aug 31, 2017 11:55, "PBKResearch" <peter@pbkresearch.co.uk> wrote:
Stef
Done - https://pharo.fogbugz.com/f/cases/20363/ThemeIcons- downloadTo-has-an-argument-which-is-never-referenced-in-code
What really puzzled me is that this situation was not picked up by a code critic. 'Local variable declared and not referenced' is a common critic message, and this looks like a parallel situation. But I don't think this can be called a bug in the code critic system - can it?
Peter Kenny
-----Original Message----- From: Pharo-users [mailto:pharo-users-bounces@lists.pharo.org] On Behalf Of Stephane Ducasse Sent: 31 August 2017 19:16 To: Any question about pharo is welcome <pharo-users@lists.pharo.org> Subject: Re: [Pharo-users] Code mystery
Can you open a bug entry? I can tell you that we clean a lot but human activity will always leads to glitches.
On Tue, Aug 29, 2017 at 1:23 AM, Dimitris Chloupis <kilon.alios@gmail.com> wrote:
You are not going crazy that's an ugly method. Probably the author intended to use dir and the forgot about it and instead hard coded the dir path inside a class method. A mistake that can happen to anyone.
The method will have to be updated anyway because name is to be removed, so it won't work.
As always too much code too few people. If you think that's bad embrace yourself if you try to read Morphic code. Huge suffering for me when I tried to learn how the task bar works and apparently using it wrong it freezes the image.
Tons of Pharo code needs a clean but needs also a lot more people. On Tue, 29 Aug 2017 at 01:52, PBKResearch <peter@pbkresearch.co.uk> wrote:
Hello All
Following the discussion on dark mode, I was browsing the code on themes (in Moose 6.1 = Pharo 6.0, Latest update: #60486). In Class ThemeIcons, I found this method:
downloadTo: dir
| zipArchive |
zipArchive := self class destinationPath / (self name, '.zip').
zipArchive exists
ifFalse: [
ZnClient new
url: self url;
downloadTo: zipArchive ].
^ zipArchive
The mystery is that the argument dir is not referred to anywhere in the code. It probably works, because the only invocation of the method is from ThemeIcons>>downloadFromUrl, which sets the argument from self class destinationPath, and the code above recreates this as the path to zipArchive.
I thought I understood Smalltalk coding fairly well, but this really puzzles me. Why would anyone code like this? Shouldnât it be picked up by a code critic? Or am I going crazy?
Any help gratefully received
Peter Kenny