I like the idea of a "style coach" very much! That'll be very handy also for students/beginners, actually.
-- Éric On Nov 23, 2012, at 5:52 AM, Eli Barzilay wrote: > Yesterday, Eric Tanter wrote: >> That sounds like a great option "from the quick hacks dept" as you >> say ;) >> >> Anyway, I was wondering whether that wouldn't be something that >> makes sense for DrRacket to have at some point. Just like you can >> configure default spacing for specific keywords. > > Soemthing that I have said about this in the past: I think that > formatting code is too individual to have a one-size-fit-all tool, so > you can't do something practical. If you try to, then you're likely > to fall into the Emacs trap where indentation etc have a huge number > of customization option, to the point that most plain users never use > them. > > Instead, I think that it is much more effective to do a tool that > *recommends* changes rather than do them. Maybe some kind of a "style > coach"? > > I have some code (which I posted in the past, IIRC) that checks style > problems in code and reports them -- something like that could be > turned into such a tool. Something that would work very nicely IMO is > a tool that works like a spell checker, where you see the > recommendations one by one, and for each one you can ignore it, ignore > all of the problems of the same rule, or let it fix it. (Ideally, > you'd also have some "that's how I want my code" option, so that when > I use it in my own style of `if'-indentation I can say that this is > how all of my `if's should be indented...) > > [And BTW, this is not only for paren shapes and indentation -- I use > it for other things like (if E #f #t) or (if E1 E2 #f), where it > prints a comment that says that you should use (not E) and (and E1 E2) > resp.] > > -- > ((lambda (x) (x x)) (lambda (x) (x x))) Eli Barzilay: > http://barzilay.org/ Maze is Life! > ____________________ Racket Users list: http://lists.racket-lang.org/users
