A Domain-Specific Language for Scripting Refactorings in Erlang

Refactoring is the process of changing the design of a program without changing its behaviour. Many refactoring tools have been developed for various programming languages; however, their 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 large-scale refactorings efficiently and effectively. 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 and ‘undone’ interactively.