> With no dependency tracking it was just a manually-maintained bag of class-and-method definitions
True. A simple improvement would be to make the change-list contain also the (single) previous version of every changed methods, as well as the class-definition that was in effect when the method was changed. That would not have been too much added code to carry I think.
Then maybe augment the importer so it warns if the previous versions don't match the current versions if the new versions don't match either.
In the end a tool is just a tool, to make programming easier and to find errors more easily. No tool solves all the problems. That is why I think Smalltalk was so great even if it didn't have compile-time type-checking, it was still easy and fast to spot errors in your code.
True. A simple improvement would be to make the change-list contain also the (single) previous version of every changed methods, as well as the class-definition that was in effect when the method was changed. That would not have been too much added code to carry I think.
Then maybe augment the importer so it warns if the previous versions don't match the current versions if the new versions don't match either.
In the end a tool is just a tool, to make programming easier and to find errors more easily. No tool solves all the problems. That is why I think Smalltalk was so great even if it didn't have compile-time type-checking, it was still easy and fast to spot errors in your code.