Renaming Parts of Identifiers Consistently within Code Clones

Abstract

Copying and pasting source code results in code duplication. A common form of software reuse involves modifying the new duplicate to fit a current task. The similar code fragments (code clones) may be edited inconsistently by the programmer, for various reasons, leaving a bug in the software that may remain undetected by both the programmer and the compiler. A previously published tool, CReN, helps the programmer by automatically renaming all instances of the same identifier consistently within a clone when one is edited. In this tool demo, we introduce an extension of CReN, an Eclipse plug-in named LexId, which renames the same parts of different identifiers consistently together within code clones.