So, in Smalltalk, the way you find out about what's in the system is reflection...you ask the classes what methods they implement (if looking for 'implementors'), you ask the methods for the source and can string search the code (if looking for senders).
There's no real way to get the source code from a compiled code object , although there are some tools, like decompyle, which will try for you. I think some people on this list were discussing the potential utility of having a __source__ attribute for code objects, but Python currently doesn't do this. You can probably also get some mileage out of the inspect module (try 'pydoc inspect'), but that *does* compile the code you're inspecting.
It worked fine for a file that just defined functions and classes. However, files that had code not contained in classes or functions caused a bit of a problem because loading the module would execute that code and that's not what I wanted.
To get at top-level module code like this, you'll have to parse the file and walk the AST - there's no other way. In a well implemented library or app, however, there typically shouldn't be much important code being executed at the top level. Typically the top-level code will be initialization of singleton globals or decorator-type function wrappers, and you can get at most of the important names reflectively through the inspect module.
/arg
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