Automatic code refactoring

[Calvin Spealman]

Richard Dale wrote:
> Excellent! But what about using Bicycle Repair Man, and just adding a UI
> to it? That's what Eric3 does, as otherwise you'd have to re-write it.

I probably will start with a UI for BRM, but I would like to continue by
expanding on BRM or adding features to KDevelop itself in such areas.

> At the moment the ruby class parser uses just regular expressions, and it
> isn't much more complicated than the python one. I'd like to improve it
> for KDevelop 3.3 by using the actual ruby 1.8.2 bison grammar and
> tokeniser. But I don't see any need for a common parser as long as the
> things we do with the parsed data is language independent, which it is at
> present.

The benefit is that all these languages already have BNF/EBNF files readily
available and so a centralized parser will reduce develop time of new
language support, as well as reduce the likely-hood of incorrectly parsing
these new languages.

In many cases, the BNFs could also be used to derive some scope information
from the source, leading to better autocompletion, among other things.

--