Hello, I was going through the source code of the GROOVY_2_5_X branch, just studying the inner workings of the runtime. (So if I'm saying something foolish please excuse my inexperience) I came across groovy.lang.MetaClass.getClassNode, which strikes me as an inappropriate method as a part of the runtime. This method seems potentially useful, but unnecessarily couples compile time to the runtime apparatus. As far as static analysis goes, I've found getClassNode used in some tests for AstBuilder, and as part of some clever tricks in groovy.sql.DataSet. As I've already established, I'm not an expert at the matter, but I think the MetaClass interface would be cleaner without this method. I realise that it's part of a public(?) interface, so deletion might not be an option, but do you think a deprecation and a stern warning would be appropriate? The MetaClassImpl implementation of this method only works as long as the source is available and can be located on the classpath. Even if this is the case, the compiler is pretty convoluted, and I'm not even sure that the same AST can be generated at runtime as compile time. I've tried to look into the history of this method, and a pretty ancient commit mentions this as a residual feature, which should be removed: https://github.com/apache/groovy/commit/9ebea0cbddcad1ab6636da61962a368138828bf0#diff-3a2f96e7344aaac477f01c5f7e0d3d88R115
Best regards Marton
