Question

I have tried to be disciplined about decomposing into small reusable methods when possible. As the project growing, I am re-implementing the exact same method.

I would like to know how to deal with this in an automated way. I am not looking for an IDE specific solution. Dependency on method names may not be sufficient. Unix and scripting are solutions that would be extremely beneficial. Answers such as “take care” etc. are not the solutions I am seeking.

Answer 1

I think the cheapest solution to implement might be to use Google Desktop. A more accurate solution would probably be much harder to implement – treat your code base as a collection of documents where the identifiers (or tokens in the identifiers) are words of the document, and then use document clustering techniques to find the closest matching code to a query. I’m aware of some research similar to that, but nothing close to out-of-the-box code that you could use. You might try looking on Google Code Search for something. I don’t think they offer a desktop version, but you might be able to find some applicable code you can adapt.

Edit: And here’s a list of somebody’s favorite code search engines. I don’t know whether any are adaptable for local use.

Edit2: Source Code Search Engine is mentioned in the comments following the list of code search engines. It appears to be a commercial product (with a free evaluation version) that is intended to be used for searching local code.