So you are saying that the most of the tooling required for an 
auto-formatting tool is already there?

On Thursday, 9 January 2014 14:42:40 UTC+1, Stefan Karpinski wrote:
>
> I would be into having an auto-formatting tool. The way to do this would 
> be to work on the printing of ASTs until the way the code prints is the 
> standard way it should be formatted. Then you have an auto-formatter: parse 
> the code and print the resulting AST. One missing thing is that parser 
> currently discards comments.
>
>
> On Thu, Jan 9, 2014 at 6:48 AM, Job van der Zwan 
> <[email protected]<javascript:>
> > wrote:
>
>> The problem I see with that is that you can wait for a *very* long time 
>> before any consensus emerges. There are simply many choices to be made in 
>> that regard which at the end of the day are kind of arbitrary - that 
>> *a*choice is made and consistently followed is more important, and again the 
>> benefit of autoformatting is that you don't have to waste putting effort 
>> into doing so.
>>
>> Having something something concrete to respond to also helps with the 
>> discussion - an autoformatting tool will impose a certain style, which will 
>> drive the discussion of standardising proper style. If people disagree with 
>> the formatting it provides, great! That means a discussion is triggered.
>>
>> So instead of waiting for a consensus to emerge, I think that building an 
>> autoformatting tool with a "good enough first guess" in terms of style 
>> would be the place to start. Even if it starts out with terrible style 
>> choices otherwise.
>>
>> (is this worth starting a separate discussion on the topic?)
>>
>>
>> On Thursday, 9 January 2014 03:18:05 UTC+1, John Myles White wrote:
>>
>>> There is not yet, because there is still not a consensus on proper 
>>> style. Hopefully once we have that, it will be easier to make a julia fmt 
>>> tool. 
>>>
>>>  — John 
>>>
>>> On Jan 8, 2014, at 6:09 PM, Job van der Zwan <[email protected]> 
>>> wrote: 
>>>
>>> > Depends on what you mean with legibility. 
>>> > 
>>> > For example (and not at all related to x.f(y) vs f(x, y)), if I look 
>>> at my experience with the Go programming language, once you get used to its 
>>> imposed One True Way of formatting it really makes reading other people's 
>>> source code a lot easier. And talking about spending energy on the subject 
>>> of legibility: setting up my editor to use go-fmt (the autoformatting tool) 
>>> when building/saving code means I don't have to spend any time thinking 
>>> about it when writing my own code either; it will automatically get fixed. 
>>> > 
>>> > It's one of those things the Go developers are very enthusiastic 
>>> about, and at first you go "really? That's a killer feature?" but after 
>>> using it you do start to miss it in other languages. 
>>> > 
>>> > Speaking of which, is there an autoformatting tool for Julia? 
>>>
>>
>

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