RE: [PyCrust] CallTips and AutoComp need work

[Patrick K. O'B. <po...@or...>]

The shell editor contains text and nothing else. I can't do anything
introspective with that text until I turn it into an object reference. That
means there is no way to get a call tip or auto complete list without doing
an eval() on that text. Doing an eval() may have side effects. Or it may
simply fail because the text passed to it is not valid syntax or not a known
object.

At this point, the PyCrust calltip and autocomp do NOT eval() code that
contains a method or function call, such as in your third example below. So
it won't pop up a call tip or autocomp on those. However, in your third
example, it does try to eval('.getText') and that fails, as you might
expect. But the eval() is in a try: block so the program goes on without a
hitch. The result that you are seeing is that this failure inside the try:
block writes an error message to the dos window and I'm pretty sure that has
to do with where the current functions are located and I am working on
restructuring that code.

The other issue, to me, is, wouldn't it be nice to be able to get an
autocomplete list on simple code like "dir()." and so forth? Even your third
example doesn't have a serious side effect.

---
Patrick K. O'Brien
Orbtech
"I am, therefore I think."

-----Original Message-----
From: pyc...@li...
[mailto:pyc...@li...]On Behalf Of Kevin Altis
Sent: Wednesday, August 08, 2001 12:47 PM
To: pyc...@li...
Subject: RE: [PyCrust] CallTips and AutoComp need work

I don't see how you could know whether a method has side-effects or not. I
reiterate what I said originally, which is that if you can't get a doc
string without doing an eval on the code, then you shouldn't try. That means
stuff like this in PythonCard:
bg = pcapp.getCurrentBackground() # can return a doc string
fld1 = bg.find('field1')          # can return a doc string
bg.find('field1).getText()        # can't return a doc string for getText

Does that make sense?