Question

Can I get FSI.exe, the F# Interactive tool, to describe a type for me? In other words, there is a type I know how to access (specifically, IExpression in the Infer.NET library) but I do not know which methods it provides. I am hoping that I can use fsi to get a description of the available methods, properties, etc.

Can this be done, or is there a better way to go about it? I, sadly, do not have Visual Studio, which is how I used to get this information…

Thanks,
Nels

Answer 1

This depends on what you mean by “describe”, and how automated a process you are looking for. It’s quite easy to use the .NET reflection libraries to determine what public methods a type has. For example:

typeof<System.String>.GetMethods()

will give you an array containing MethodInfos for all of the public methods on the String class. You can do exactly the same thing for any other types.

You can write a simple method to streamline the process:

let showMethods(t:System.Type) =
  t.GetMethods() |> Seq.iter (printfn "%A")