Identifying clones in functional programs for refactoring

Abstract

Clone detection is well established for imperative programs.It works mostly on the statement level and therefore is ill-suited for func-tional programs, whose main constituents are expressions and types. Inthis paper we introduce clone detection for functional programs usinga new intermediate program representation, dubbed Functional ControlTree. We extend clone detection to the identification of non-trivial func-tional program clones based on the recursion patterns from the so-calledBird-Meertens formalism.