Lang.NEXT panel (dfix)

[Stefan Koch via Digitalmars-d-announce]

> What's keeping us from having such a tool? It seems that after 
> one has a decent parser (that also keeps tracks of the source 
> ranges of AST nodes), it's easy to write code that does 
> syntactic modifications and then rewrites the source code. And 
> there's several D parsers out there already - so it should be 
> too much effort to get there.
> Even I am working on a tool that can be easily retrofitted for 
> this purpose.
>
> Or maybe I am misunderstanding the amount of semantic analysis 
> that would typically be required? Can someone give some 
> examples of modifications that would be useful for such a dfix 
> tool? (I haven't yet had the time to watch the full panel 
> video, if that's relevant)

Well, my recent efforts lead my to belief that I am in over my 
head with this.
But ... many sufficiently simple transformations can be done with 
a complex regex and for me that is faster, given the trouble I 
have with writing ASTMatchers for Dscanner.
BTW. Does anyone know a good approch to a DSL describeing 
AST-transformation patterns ?
What I currently have is SQL-like Syntax and I feel it won't 
scale to complex  selction and/or transformation patterns.
Input is welcome.