refactoring using parser

I feel that in order to do more rigorous refactoring the refactoring
tools are better able to parse the source file. For example, I want to
change a class name. The simplest solution is to do a string
replacement, but this might accidentally change some variables with
the same name.

The ultimate solution is to figure which are the class names in the
source code by parsing the source code, then do the replacements.

But the problem is that it is not easy to write a parse for any
full-blown languages (e.g. C++). It is also might take a lot of effort
to understand existing compiler to add refactoring functionality.

I'm wondering what is the current trend in solving the
problem that I mentioned above.


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