Automatic refactoring of Erlang programs

This paper describes the design goals and current status of tidier, a software tool that tidies Erlang source code, making it cleaner, simpler, and often also more efficient. In contrast to other refactoring tools, tidier is completely automatic and is not tied to any particular editor or IDE. Instead, tidier comes with a suite of code transformations that can be selected by its user via command-line options and applied in bulk on a set of modules or entire applications using a simple command. Alternatively, users can use tidier’s GUI to inspect one by one the transformations that will be performed on their code and manually select only those that they fancy. We have used tidier to clean up various applications of Erlang/OTP and have tested it on many open source Erlang code bases of significant size. We briefly report our experiences and show opportunities for tidier’s current set of transformations on existing Erlang code out there. As a by-product, our paper also documents w...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: PPDP
• Authors: Konstantinos F. Sagonas, Thanassis Avgerinos
• Keywords: Code, Erlang Code, Erlang Source Code, PPDP 2009, Programming Languages