Newbie question on renaming

From: William Bland (news_at_abstractnonsense.com)
Date: 05/07/04 

Date: Thu, 06 May 2004 22:57:52 GMT

Hi all,
        When I want to rename a variable in a statically typed language like
Java, I'm pretty lazy about it: I rename the variable where it's defined,
compile, and then change the name in all the places the compiler tells me
about. I like knowing that, if it compiled, I found all the places that
needed changing.

Of course I do much prefer dynamic typing, except that now I can't see an
easy way to rename things (search-and-replace doesn't work because I reuse
names sometimes, and often names are substrings of each other).

I guess this is the kind of thing that "refactoring browsers" are meant to
do (guessing because I've never used one). I wonder how hard it would be
to get Emacs to rename a variable, taking into account scope?

Since we have a built in "parser" in the form of READ one could, of
course, write a Lisp program that renames variables in other Lisp
programs... that's way above my newbie level of Lisp at the moment though.

Am I missing something simple? How do other people do this kind of thing?

Cheers,
        Bill. 

-- 
Dr. William Bland.
It would not be too unfair to any language to refer to Java as a
stripped down Lisp or Smalltalk with a C syntax.   (Ken Anderson).

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