Improving Prolog Programs: Refactoring for Prolog
Abstract
Refactoring is an established technique from the OO-community to restructure code: it aims at improving software readability, maintainability and extensibility. Although refactoring is not tied to the OO-paradigm in particular, its ideas have not been applied to Logic Programming until now. This paper applies the ideas of refactoring to Prolog programs. A catalogue is presented listing refactorings classified according to scope. Some of the refactorings have been adapted from the OO-paradigm, while others have been specifically designed for Prolog. Also the discrepancy between intended and operational semantics in Prolog is addressed by some of the refactorings. In addition, ViPReSS, a semi-automatic refactoring browser, is discussed and the experience with applying \vipress to a large Prolog legacy system is reported. Our main conclusion is that refactoring is not only a viable technique in Prolog but also a rather desirable one.
Cite
@article{arxiv.cs/0406026,
title = {Improving Prolog Programs: Refactoring for Prolog},
author = {Tom Schrijvers and Alexander Serebrenik},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:cs/0406026},
year = {2007}
}
Comments
To appear in ICLP 2004