Script editor-refactoring tools

Integrated development environments (IDE) for many languages have language aware refactoring features.

While the current Iguana script editor has a find and replace feature within a file, that is purely text for text. That may suffice at a very small amount of code, but makes small changes to the code base onerous, stifling scaling the code base and leading to code rot.

Therefore the refactor-rename feature in some IDEs understands that one is tackling a variable or a function, or the file name itself and performs much better at dealing with the impact.

While using local variables and local functions helps with reducing the external impact of a name collisions or the use or arbitrary names, the public interface names presented by a module span the file in which it is defined and the files in which they are used.

Yes – funny – been using a feature like that achieved with a plugin into Visual Studio for some other work.

Incidentally I would recommend having a look at:

Find Global Symbols

It’s very helpful in identifying the unintentional use of globals.