\chapter{Introduction}
%src: cocci website, LWN article

Coccinelle is a tool to help automate repetitive
source-to-source style-preserving program transformations
on C source code, like for instance to perform some refactorings.
%coupling: readme.txt
Coccinelle is presented as a command line tool called \spatch that takes
as input the name of a file containing the specification of a program
transformation, called a {\em semantic patch}, and a set of C files,
and then performs the transformation on all those C files.
%synopsis ?

To make it easy to express those transformations,
Coccinelle proposes a WYSISWYG approach where the C programmer
can leverage the things he already knows: the C syntax
and the patch syntax. Indeed, with Coccinelle transformations
are written in a specific language called SmPL, for
Semantic Patch Language, which as its name suggests is very
close to the syntax of a patch, but does not
work at a line level, as traditional patches do,
but rather at higher, semantic level.

Here is an example of a simple program transformation.
To replace every call to \verb+foo+ of any expression $x$
by a call to \verb+bar+, create a semantic patch file \verb+ex1.cocci+
(semantic patches usually end with the \verb+.cocci+  filename extension)
containing:
\begin{verbatim}
@@ expression x; @@

- foo(x)
+ bar(x)

\end{verbatim}

Then to ``apply'' the specified program transformation to a set of C files,
simply do:
\begin{verbatim}
$ spatch --sp-file ex1.cocci *.c
\end{verbatim}


Coccinelle primarily targets ANSI C, and supports some GCC extensions, and partially, C++.  It
has only partial support for K\&R C.  K\&R function declarations are only
recognized if the parameter declarations are indented.  Furthermore, the
parameter names are subsequently considered to be type names, due to
confusion with function prototypes, in which a name by itself is indeed the
name of a type.


%command line:

%can do inplace, or with git, cf chapter on developing ...

%Other approaches
%instead of
%expressing the transformation on the internal representation
%of a C frontend, for instance the abstract syntax tree
%used internally by gcc, which would require for the user
%to learn how to use this internal data structure,

%if can find and transform, can also find, so semantic grep.

%vs regexp
%vs ast

%features:
%src: darcs manual

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