Extending Erlang by utilising RefactorErl

Abstract

In this paper, we present the idea of utilising a refactoring tool for implementing extensions to a programming language. We elaborate the correspondence between the main components of the compiler and the refactoring tool, and examine how analysis and transformation features of the tool can be exploited for turning its refactoring framework into a translation framework. The presented method allows one, for instance, to make the Erlang language supportive for embedding domain specific languages as well as to make its functions portable.