School of Computing

A Domain-Specific Language for Scripting Refactorings in Erlang

Huiqing Li and Simon Thompson

Technical Report 5-11, October 2011.

Abstract

Refactoring is the process changing the design of a program without changing its behaviour. Many refactoring tools have been developed for various programming languages; while these told support primitive, atomic refactorings, support for composite refactorings -- refactorings that are composed from a number of primitive refactorings -- is limited. In particular, there is a lack of powerful and easy-to-use frameworks that allow users to script their own reusable composite refactorings in order to carry out large-scale, or batch, refactorings efficiently.

This paper introduces the domain-specific language framework of Wrangler -- a refactoring and code inspection tool for Erlang programs -- that allows users to script composite refactorings, test them and apply them on the fly. The composite refactorings are fully integrated into Wrangler and so can be previewed, applied interactively and `undone'.

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Bibtex Record

@techreport{3172,
author = {Huiqing Li and Simon Thompson},
title = {A {D}omain-{S}pecific {L}anguage for  {S}cripting {R}efactorings in {E}rlang},
month = {October},
year = {2011},
pages = {},
keywords = {Refactorings,  DSL,  Wrangler, composite},
note = {},
doi = {},
url = {http://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/pubs/2011/3172},
    publication_type = {techreport},
    submission_id = {6599_1318520126},
    number = {5-11},
}

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Last Updated: 12/03/2012 17:33