Access to method source

[0x75]

Hello Julia Dev Team,

please implement the ability to access the sourcecode of a function by typing in the
function name. R has this ability and it is incredibly helpfull to read good, performant code
and understand the system.
Article about the matter:
http://dorophone.blogspot.de/2011/07/duckspeak-vs-smalltalk.html

regards 0x75

[simonbyrne]

You can use the @less macro for this, for example:

@less factor(10)

For future reference, this sort of question would best be asked on the julia-users mailing list.

[StefanKarpinski]

For what it's worth, I kind of want this too. One can't, for example, see what the source of functions entered in the REPL were – only functions where the source exists in a file somewhere and hasn't changed. One potential (clever) way to do this is to record the source lines of the inputs to the REPL as the ~/.julia_history file since we are recording what people enter there.

[quinnj]

It's something I've been meaning to play around with, see #7536

[simonbyrne]

It would also be nice to be able to access the actual AST of a method, pre-lowering: i.e. obtain an AST that could be re-evaluated to give the same method. The method here no longer works.

[Jutho]

I agree, very useful also in the context of stagedfunctions.

[StefanKarpinski]

Let's reopen this for further discussion. I agree that pre-lowered AST would be great to have and with good enough pretty printing would suffice for most purposes.

[JeffBezanson]

duplicate of #2625