Incorporação de novas refatorações para linguagem Fortran no IDE Eclipse

Abstract

Refactoring is a software engineering technique that aims to perform internal changes in the application source code, without influence on its functionality and results. This technique is not restricted only to source code and can be applied also in several other components of a software system, such as application design, analysis models, databases, among others. Refactoring is a permanently present task in the life cycle of software, and it seeks to improve non-functional aspects of applications, such as readability and reusability of code, including a possible gain in performance on the refactored software. Refactoring techniques are widely used in systems developed for the object orientation paradigm and are present in a number of automated tools that work in this paradigm. In scientific computing, in which large amounts of legacy code written in languages before the object-oriented programming paradigm, refactoring is not enough explored, mainly because these codes are written in a little commercialized language today. The Fortran language (FORmula TRANslation) is usually used in scientific applications, but lacks tools for code refactoring. In this context, we explore this deficiency by automating refactorings, using the Photran framework (a plugin for editing Fortran code integrated into the Eclipse IDE). Some techniques are developed and integrated in Photran, based on the identification of open issues concerning actions of refactoring to Fortran code. The automated techniques are used in applications written in Fortran, to assess its operation and validate them to be used in applications written in Fortran by the user community of Eclipse IDE.