Re: [semi off topic] grep-based refactoring [was: Adding refactoring capabilities to Emacs]

[João Távora]

On Fri, Sep 8, 2023 at 2:31 PM <tomas@tuxteam.de> wrote:
>
> On Fri, Sep 08, 2023 at 01:52:53PM +0100, João Távora wrote:
>
> [...]
>
> > Great.  Precise project-wide analysis (as opposed to more-or-less dumb
> > grep-based) is exactly the main thing we should be targeting IMO.
> >  Is "rename" the only thing it does or can you, say, extract subexpressions
> > to variables, organize imports, etc?
>
> As someone who has done quite a bit of "grep based refactoring", one
> observation: of course, this can only me made semi-manually. But then,
> the process has found things for me a syntax based refactoring tool
> wouldn't ever have,

Not sure about that.  Clangd mentions this limitation specifically
in their web page, so they acknowledge it and possibly are looking
to fix it.  It's not too wild to think that an LSP server might
to suggest additional edits beyond what it has from syntactic
analysis, who knows maybe even using language models or by using
a parser that understands doxygen or common types of documentation
systems using comments.

So the only thing we know for sure is that grep-based isn't enough.

João