Is a refactoring Perl IDE possible and practical?

[matisse]

As I work with larger and larger Perl projects, and with more
developers on a project, I more frequently wish I had a good IDE for
Perl that handled various refactoring chores, for example, the way
Eclipse (for Java) does "extract method" and tries to fix the variable
references for you.

Given how flexible Perl's syntax is, how realistic is it to expect that
with Perl 6 someone could create a proper IDE for Perl that handled
large projects with many classes, and which would make it easy to do
basic refactoring of code?

(For those not familiar with refactoring, it means a methodical
re-writing of code in ways that improve it "internally" without
changing its "external" behavior, a classic example would be creating a
new subroutine to replace 3 or more chunks of code that are basically
the same. See: http://www.refactoring.com/)

[Matisse Enzer]

So maybe everyone was on holiday, or maybe my question that I started
this thread with was out of place, but I'm posting again here to see if
anyone has an opinion about this - will Perl 6 make it practical to
have tools like "Eclipse" for Perl?

[Matisse Enzer]

It turns out that there is a plugin for Eclipse, called EPIC, that has
just started to support very limited refactoring in Perl 5, using the
Devel::Refactor module.

Eclipse is available at http://www.eclipse.org/ and the Eclipse Perl
Integration project (EPIC) is at http://e-p-i-c.sourceforge.net/

I do hope that Perl 6 makes it much easy to do automated refactoring of
Perl code, supporting most of the techniques described at
http://www.refactoring.com/catalog/