A delta‐oriented approach to support the safe reuse of black‐box code rewriters

Abstract Large‐scale corrective and perfective maintenance is often automated thanks to rewriting rules using tools such as Python2to3 , Spoon , or Coccinelle . Such tools consider these rules as black‐boxes and compose multiple rules by chaining them: giving the output of a given rewriting rule as input to the next one. It is up to the developer to identify the right order (if it exists) among all the different rules to yield the right …