TITLE: Refactoring Support for Scheme Programmers
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: October 08, 2004  5:40 AM
DESC: I have begun work on a simple refactoring browser for Scheme.
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BODY:
In a 
<A HREF="http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2004-10.html#e2004-10-04T17_44_46.htm">
   recent post</A>,
I mentioned that a group of my students is doing an XP-style project
in Scheme.  They have available a nice
<A HREF="http://schematics.sourceforge.net/schemeunit.html">
   Scheme unit testing framework</A>,
equivalent to
<A HREF="http://www.junit.org/">
   JUnit</A>
and tools available in many languages.  Teams working in Java also
have tool support for refactoring, particularly the open-source
<A HREF="http://www.eclipse.org/">
   Eclipse</A>
and the academically-inexpensive
<A HREF="http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/">
   IntelliJ IDEA</A>.
But googling and checking the
<A HREF="http://www.refactoring.com/tools.html">
   refactoring tools page</A>
reveal no refactoring browser or IDE for Scheme.  There are plenty
of tools for Java, an increasing number for C#, and even one for
Python... but none for Scheme.  I am aware of a project by Simon
Thompson and Claus Reinke on
<A HREF="http://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/projects/refactor-fp/">
   refactoring functional programs</A>,
but they are targeting the pure, statically-typed functional language
<A HREF="http://www.haskell.org/">
   Haskell</A>.

I think that the Scheme group most likely to produce a wonderful
 refactoring browser soon is the
<A HREF="http://www.drscheme.org/">
   Dr. Scheme group</A>,
but I don't think they have done anything in this direction yet.
They do have a unit testing framework integrated right into their
IDE, though.

One of my current R&amp;D goals is to create a simple refactoring
browser for Scheme.  I started a project on Scheme-processing tools
last spring, and refactoring is the first big tool I want to
produce.  Right now, I'm working in Java, because of its
platform-independent support for GUI code and because it is
most accessible to my students at the university.  Eventually,
I could see migrating to Dr. Scheme, and writing the tools and
browser in Scheme itself.

If you are a a student who is interested in working on this project,
<A HREF="mailto:wallingf@cs.uni.edu">
   let me know</A>.
If you know of any other projects targeting refactoring support
for Scheme programmers,
<A HREF="mailto:wallingf@cs.uni.edu">
   let me know</A>.
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