2 Building Your Program
Several Vortex commands are available to examine the inheritance hierarchy, methods, and fields of the program currently being compiled. To use them, it is necessary first to run a make command (like make or graphs) on the program, or, instead, load a checkpoint that was saved after a make command had been run.
parents objectspec -- display (immediate) parents of the object specified by objectspecint or list 1)
all_parents objectspec -- same, but include indirect ancestors
children objectspec -- display (immediate) children of the object specified by objectspec (except for descendants of predicate objects)
all_children objectspec -- same, but include indirect descendants
methods objectspec -- display methods and fields where the specified object is the specializer of at least one formal
all_methods objectspec -- same, but the specified object may be either the specializer or inherit from the specializer (the specializer any doesn't count)
[all_]fields objectspec -- same, but display only fields
methdefs methodname [[nparams] nargs] -- display all implementations of the message with the given name, number of type parameters and number of formal arguments (0s by default)
matchmeths name -- display all message names that include string name
Two options affect the selection of displayed objects, methods, or fields
browse_predicate_objects - when false, don't include predicate objects
browse_private_methods - when false, don't include private methods or fields
Typing help browse will print a summary of these commands.