The go people are poking at this. They ship a tool, 'go fix', that can safely refactor your code to deal with backwards-incompatible API changes. Go also has a tool, 'go fmt', that most people use to enforce tabs vs spaces, etc., but has a 'rewrite' flag that you can use to do simple, arbitrary transformations.
They also ship some AST tools for go, though I haven't seen much use made of them.
Try loading this snippet, checking the "Import" box, and clicking "Format": http://play.golang.org/p/jS4s_Xz26v
To use it locally:
$ go get code.google.com/p/go.tools/cmd/goimportsWhen did that get added? That's brilliant!
And Slamhound is definitely barking up the same tree. Very interesting!
*The small problem with this example is that in fact the latter has been achieved.
Unfortunately, I freely admit that the joke goes right over my head. I used to know something about Riemann surfaces, so I could invest some time and eventually get the joke perhaps, but I just don't have time now. :)
Set Theory Natural Numbers Integers Rationals Real Numbers Complex Numbers Calculus Riemann Surfaces
(as the Apple ads say, some steps skipped)
The only point I was making was that the level you were thinking at was much higher than the level SEXPs are at. Trying to envisage how we get there remains hard. TL;DR I was agreeing with you. :)
That provides some incredible power and may be the thing about Go that impresses me the most.
What if we also made programming language decisions about syntax, modularity constructs, etc., all with that goal in mind? (And perhaps Go has to a large degree).
You should be able to specify a type name, identifier, or module and its' replacement (optionally file & line to be specific) via CLI. It should do the replacement automatically, and fail if it at all changes the semantics (e.g. clash or variable shadowing) and give an overridable warning on a non-semantics-changing possible problem (like an unused shadowed variable).
Sure, this is a normal feature for an IDE, but I feel like it should be simpler (and I don't like IDE bloat anyways). Maybe the tools you mentioned can already do this.
this is a pretty powerful package.