New good practice / programming / list_methods()

[favorites]

I am forging a new good practice in Object Oriented programming.
You have a method , declared just after the constructor that will return all other methods available there listed.
Please always consider this good practice to help you manage your code and trace the methods available for your objects.


" Saying Youtube is not enough"

[tokenuser]

Objective C already has that type of functionality, but I found that even better is making sure that you can generate a JavaDocs type class/method hierarchy directly from the code. It requires that you are a little more anal about how you do comments for class and methods, but basically creates self documenting classes.

[ghelyar]

This seems completely pointless to me.


In C, header files list this kind of thing anyway.

In higher level languages, there is always something to generate documentation, which will list this. Java has it (javadoc), Python has it (dir/help), all .net languages have it, etc. These are all essentially in comments so that they don't get in the way.

On top of that, most IDEs will have a way to jump to specific functions/methods and that will be essentially a list of them.



Documentation should not get in the way of functionality. Imagine how messed up your UML is going to get if you have to add list_methods all over the place needlessly. Come to think of it, a list of methods should be in your UML anyway. There's a best practice for you.

Except in extenuating circumstances, such as being specifically asked to use some obscure language, if you need to do this then you're doing something wrong.