Transformations towards clean functional code

Abstract

The programming style has an impact on the readability and comprehensibility of the source code, and it may also affect run-time performance. This statement also holds for functional languages when the functional style is mixed with imperative design. In this paper, we present a couple of methods that can refactor imperatively styled Erlang source-code into a more functionally styled one. This can be done by transforming unnecessary calls to length, hd and tl into pattern matching or by lifting particular nested expressions. The results of our investigations indicate that these refactorings can not only shorten the length of the source code but also affect the complexity/readability. In this paper, we present some refactorings; moreover, real-life examples and data for its validation.