Batch code editing (was: [GD-General] C++ analyzers?)

[Grills, J. <jg...@so...>]

I frequently use perl to do these sorts of things.  I have a small template
perl script that I customize a bit every time I need to do this.  It's
pretty smart too -- it's do the replacement in the file, and check for
changes, and only if it changed will it check the file out of source control
(perforce, of course) and then update its contents.

j

-----Original Message-----
From: Thatcher Ulrich [mailto:tu...@tu...]
Sent: Thursday, July 18, 2002 3:21 PM
To: gam...@li...
Subject: Re: [GD-General] C++ analyzers?


On Jul 18, 2002 at 12:41 -0700, Brian Hook wrote:
> Quite true, and this illustrates my earlier comments of how bad most
> software development tools.  Something as conceptually simple as
> renaming a variable can be incredibly difficult to manage.  Even using a
> standard automated tool like perl or sed/awk you run into the problem
> that there's no context.
> 
> We have tools to automatically generate code and do all other kinds of
> fluff crap, but if you actually want something that can go through and
> rename all instances of "m_foo" for all instances of class "CBar", it
> doesn't seem possible.

Well, the compiler can sure help:

1. rename "m_foo" to "m_foobar" in the header

2. compile

3. visit each compile error and fix by hand (or with an editor macro
   if it's a big job)

I've found that manual brute force takes much longer in theory than in
practice.  Once I had to rename a 3D vector class from "vector" to
"vec3" throughout a working game; I was dreading it, but it took all
of about 30 minutes.  That's by far the worst case I've ever
encountered.  Sure it would be nice if it took 10 seconds, but it's
not something most people have to do every week.

-- 
Thatcher Ulrich
http://tulrich.com


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