vsbabu.org

Plead to programmers

Kasia Trapszo:

I ask, no, I beg if you do nothing else with your code, please, please, please format it properly. ... Indentation, spacing, break up long lines, logical variable names, avoid global variables, avoid duplication of code, avoid excessively long methods.

An emotional and sensible plea! I used to plead and curse about this quite often.

Any given day since 1995, I had to read and/or write programs in atleast 3 different languages including C, C++, HTML, Perl, PHP, SQL and PL/SQL, Shell, Awk, Python, Javascript, Java, COBOL, ASP, VB and various Markup Languages to name a few. So what is the solution? Wari got it right.

You could use python where indentation is necessary and resistance is futile.

Amen.

Tools that indent source

Another solution is to see if a language has some tool that can indent the code for you.

• C/C++: Venerable cb and GNU’s indent are pretty good.
• Pro*C: I used to use a shell script that in turn used indent.
• SQL, PL/SQL: I don’t maintain this anymore, but 3 years ago, this lex program was good enough for me. Google finds one commercial software, sqlb. Formatter Plus is another commercial tool.
• HTML, XHTML, XML: Tidy.
• Java: Quite a few IDEs do that.
• Perl: I don’t know if it is even possible to write one! PerlTidy is an attempt at this.
• Python: You don’t need one, but in any case, you can use pindent.py and reindent.py that ships with Python distribution - look under Tools/scripts directory.
• PHP: GUI, command-line tool.
• VB: It might be possible to beautify VBS by just opening it up in Visual Stuio - I don’t know. I’d imagine the rules for this are similar to PL/SQL, so it should be simple to write something using lex and yacc.

GNU Source Hilite is a good tool if you want to produce color-coded HTML listing of your code.

Linux C-C++ Beautifier how-to has a section on other languages.

1. Is there a beautifier for C-shell script? Thank you!

   Posted by: Keath Chen on December 9, 2002 02:35 PM

2. GNU indent should be able to format C-shell to a certain extent. I've not programmed in C-shell and so it is just a guess.

   Posted by: Babu on December 10, 2002 05:30 AM