Also, I agree that trying to refactor (say) C++ with awk would be hopelessly quixotic. I'm not an idiot. (I have written parsing and static analysis tools for a

Also, I agree that trying to refactor (say) C++ with awk would be hopelessly quixotic. I'm not an idiot. (I have written parsing and static analysis tools for an in-house language, though, just not one as screwed up as C++.) I was explaining the historical reason for vi lacking such features - grammatically ambiguous, overloading-heavy languages that combine static typing with OOP hadn't been invented yet. I think it's bad design to have refactoring tools be a part of the editor, proper, rather than as a standalone tool the editor calls. It's more a matter of static analysis (or runtime introspection) issue than editing per se.