On 11/19/13 10:39 PM, H. S. Teoh wrote:
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.
One day you should all stop doing what you are doing and focus on
bootstrapping the compiler. Then you will have a lexer/parser that's
always consistent with the language. And you will have a very big
program that will make it harder to introduce bugs in next versions. And
it will show you where you need improvements to the language.
It's really sad that D is a system's programming language but its
compiler is written in another language.
The strategy I would use is:
1. Copy the code as-is from C++ to D.
2. Make the smallest changes to make it work, even if it doesn't look
like D code.
At this point, you will have a working compiler in D and a lexer/parser
as libraries, that are always in-sync with the language.
Then:
3. Refactor the code to make it more D-ish.
Remember: the more you wait for this to happen, the harder it will be.
Just... stop, take some time, and do it.
