Dan Hipschman wrote:
Hi all.This is just a thought, and I know it would be a fair bit of work, which I don't myself have time for right now, but what do you think of two new options for GNU indent, --check and --mimic? First I'll describe --mimic. It would read in a sample C file, figure out the style options that would be used to produce such output, and then use those options for the remaining (normal) input files. For example, if foo.c is: void foo(void) { if (blah) { bonk(); } } then 'indent --mimic foo.c' would be equivalent to 'indent -br -npcs -npsl'. This makes it a lot easier to figure out the correct options to indent since it's WYSIWYG. Of course, the style that is being mimicked needs to be consistent, which brings me to --check. This would not output anything, but would check that the input has a consistent style. That is, there exists a single set of options that could produce that style. Implementing --check and --mimic boil down to pretty much the same thing since to check for consistency we need to remember what style we see in the file, and once we have that it is not hard to use it for the output. Of course, trying to understand arbitrary style could be difficult, if it happens to fall outside the range of what indent can currently produce yet still be consistent. However in that case it could be fair to simply report that there are no set of options to produce such output, since we are not really losing any functionality over what we currently have, but it would reduce headaches for people searching for a nonexistent set of options. Apologies if something like this has been proposed; I didn't go through all the mailing list archives. Dan _______________________________________________ bug-indent mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-indent
It looks to me like you're proposing something larger than indent itself! I can't see anyone taking up the challenge, however if they do I'd suggest that they write an independent program to generate the indent command line from a given source file. _______________________________________________ bug-indent mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-indent
