On Tue, Nov 19, 2013 at 08:30:18PM -0500, John J wrote: > On 11/19/2013 04:21 PM, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote: [...] > >That's exactly my point. The matter of fact is, in a setting where > >people are paid to write code, this kind of minor issue would be > >settled around the first week since hiring. At Facebook for example > >you'd be submitting a phabricator diff (loosely equivalent to a > >github pull request) and our linter will point out we use two spaces > >for indentation instead of tabs, and 80 columns. Then a couple of > >peers would point out that code is about twice as sparse vertically > >than it should. You'd fix these issues for good and that would be > >that. This has happened quite a few times. If, on the other hand, you > >chose to make a big deal out of it, that would be a cultural mismatch > >that to my knowledge would be unprecedented. [...] > This is great stuff for every developer to learn, but can someone > please create (or start creating) a code formatting tool for D? > I guess it's even worth putting some bounties on it, if that helps.
The main holdup is the lack of a ready-made, official D lexer/parser. Nobody wants to manually maintain their own version of the D lexer/parser given how fast the language is still developing (plus, it sucks to have to keep fixing lexing/parsing bugs just because DMD's lexer/parser doesn't quite work the way you thought it would). Once we have this in place, I'm quite confident that a lot of nice D tools would spring up. Pretty-printing is, after all, one of the simplest uses of lexers/parsers. T -- One reason that few people are aware there are programs running the internet is that they never crash in any significant way: the free software underlying the internet is reliable to the point of invisibility. -- Glyn Moody, from the article "Giving it all away"
