An infrastructure to support meta-differencing and refactoring of source code

The proposed research aims to construct an underlying infrastructure to support (semi) automated construction of refactorings and system wide transformation via a fine grained syntax level differencing approach. We term this differencing approach meta-differencing as it has additional knowledge of the types of entities being differenced. The general approach is built on top of an XML representation of the source code, specifically srcXML by J. Maletic et al. (2002). This representation explicitly embeds high level syntactic information within the source code in such a way as to not interfere with program development and maintenance. Because both the source code and the difference are represented in XML, the transformational language, XSLT, can be used to model these changes. We propose to develop an environment (development/maintenance) that automatically generates XSLT programs based on changes to a program.