Hacker News Reader

Oh, i like this idea. Imagine your IDE just being able to substitute method calls that are just calling single line methods, for viewing only. Or even being able to refactor them in-line, but keep them in private methods?

View on HN

With Visual Studio, you can visually inline the definition of a function below its call by selecting "Peek Definition", which is close to what you're saying.

You can only do it one at a time, and it's for quick scanning of what the function does, though.

I think Jetbrains ide's also have this. It's been a while though.

Hmm, wonder if I can coax Sublime into doing that. It's a little closer to IDE-type functionality, which it's pretty weak on (refactoring is terrible for Ruby with it).

Particularly if the editor can do things like constant folding and branch elimination based on constants that are being passed at that point.

That's just the editor doing the compiler's work at edit time, though. I know that Chuck Moore has always advocated extreme early binding, but that really is usually associated with Forth, not with mainstream languages.

I didn't mean that the editor would change what was presented to the compiler, just that it would simplify for the user when expanding the use of helper functions.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com