jssmith1
commented
8 years ago From rebuttal:
(1): R1 requested clarification on how Flower differs from Find References. Both tools enable structured navigation, however they differ primarily in terms of their user interface:
- Find references requires a new invocation every time the user navigates to a new AST node. Flower automatically updates its display upon navigation, enabling users to transition between variables and methods without re-invoking the tool. This is designed to accelerate navigation.
- In Eclipse, Find References only displays upstream references for methods. To navigate downstream, developers must switch to a separate tool, Open Declaration. In contrast, Flower displays upstream and downstream references simultaneously.
- In Visual Studio, Find References displays upstream and downstream references in a single view, whereas Flower separates them. With Find References, developers intending to navigate in a particular direction must sort through the mixed results.
- Flower highlights results in the code and enables navigation within the code via hyperlinks. Find References also highlights results in the code, but only enables developers to navigate using the external view.
We will add these differences to Section III.
As far as I can tell, this tool has the same function as "Find References" in Eclipse. This existing feature displays a list of referring code in a search output panel, and it even highlights occurrences in the code. Visual Studio also has a similar feature. If the proposed tool differs from Find References in some fashion, it would be helpful have a much clearer explanation in the Introduction and then a detailed walkthrough in Section IV.