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? Shouldn��t it be picked
>> up by a code critic? Or am I going crazy?
>>
>>
>>
>> Any help gratefully received
>>
>>
>>
>> Peter Kenny