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

[Thatcher U. <tu...@tu...>]

On Jul 18, 2002 at 02:09 -0700, Brian Hook wrote:
> But does it do context and type sensitive changes?  Will it only change
> m_uFlags to m_uEntityFlags in only those instances where's it referenced
> as an entity?  Most search and replace tools, no matter how elaborate,
> aren't designed to actually understand the actual code itself.
> 
> That's my beef with doing things manually.  If you change the name of a
> variable you can easily find the problems by compiling and fixing
> errors, but that's tedious and error prone.  Also, silent errors can get
> introduced with search and replace that's done incorrectly or that
> doesn't handle all cases:
> 
> int foo;
> int bar;
> int foobar;
> int blahbar;
> 
> s&r foo -> blah
> 
> suddenly all your foo are blah, which is what you want, but now your
> foobar are blahbar, which is NOT what you wanted.

Forgot to mention another handy technique: search & replace with an
intermediate name, like "m_foobar_TEMPORARY_CRAZY_UNIQUE_IDENTIFIER",
fix the errors, then do a global perl script on the unique identifier.
It'll be hard to turn foobar into blahbar that way.

> Maybe I'm being na?ve, but this seems like the kind of thing that would
> be trivially easy to implement (compared to writing a compiler + IDE),
> yet all we keep getting are the basic things like automatic expansion of
> member variables when you type "foo->".  Hell, and that doesn't work 95%
> of the time anymore in MSVC =|

Well, yeah, I agree you have a point, I'm just throwing out random
practical advice that I'm sure everybody knows already.  The
fundamental problem is that C++ is incredibly hard to parse; in fact
it's still an unsolved problem :)

But, I believe this new generation of compilers (GCC 3, and VC.net or
whatever) is much better about exporting program metadata, so maybe it
will be possible to build tools off that.

-- 
Thatcher Ulrich
http://tulrich.com