[Chicago-talk] Asking an class for its method list

[Ed Summers]

On Mon, Jan 26, 2004 at 12:05:18AM -0600, Steven Lembark wrote:
> Again, why would someone need this...

Reflection is useful when you are doing stuff (like I was a year ago) 
writing an application that would create a directed graph of a particularly
nasty and complicated class hierarchy. OOP is great, but sometimes it's 
hard for a new person coming in to picture that hierarchy in their head,
especially if the classes themselves have crap names.

But, as you say, this is a type of auto-documentation...which is a handy thing 
to be able to do, especially in large and complicated systems.

//Ed