Sound and extensible renaming for java

ABSTRACT

Descriptive names are crucial to understand code. However, good names are notoriously hard to choose and manually changing a globally visible name can be a maintenance nightmare. Hence, tool support for automated renaming is an essential aid for developers and widely supported by popular development environments.

This work improves on two limitations in current refactoring tools: too weak preconditions that lead to unsoundness where names do not bind to the correct declarations after renaming, and too strong preconditions that prevent renaming of certain programs. We identify two main reasons for unsoundness: complex name lookup rules make it hard to define sufficient preconditions, and new language features require additional preconditions. We alleviate both problems by presenting a novel extensible technique for creating symbolic names that are guaranteed to bind to a desired entity in a particular context by inverting lookup functions. The inverted lookup functions can then be tailored to create qualified names where otherwise a conflict would occur, allowing the refactoring to proceed and improve on the problem with too strong preconditions.

We have implemented renaming for Java as an extension to the JastAdd Extensible Java Compiler and integrated it in Eclipse. We show examples for which other refactoring engines have too weak preconditions, as well as examples where our approach succeeds in renaming entities by inserting qualifications. To validate the extensibility of the approach we have implemented renaming support for Java 5 and AspectJ like inter-type declarations as modular extensions to the initial Java 1.4 refactoring engine. The renaming engine is only a few thousand lines of code including extensions and performance is on par with industrial strength refactoring tools.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  D. Software
  D.3 PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES
      D.3.4 Processors

General Terms:
Languages

Keywords:
extensible compilers, name analysis, refactoring, renaming