A Pretty Expressive Printer (with Appendices) · HackerPapers discussions

A Pretty Expressive Printer (with Appendices) — mentioned by chubot

Wed, 21 Feb 2024 02:49:40 GMT

OK very interesting! I skimmed over the issue and some of the examples. It does seem like there are at least two schools of thought on the pretty printers -- those influenced by the Wadler pretty printing language (functional style), and those more influenced by go fmt (which does no line wrapping) and clang-format (which does). There's a very recent paper linked here which has a good survey of the functional style. Table 1 is a nice summary of the different algorithms and IRs, a bunch of them appearing only in the last 10 years. https://lobste.rs/s/aevptj/why_is_prettier_rock_solid A Pretty…

Paper and discussion history. A mention is not an endorsement.

A Pretty Expressive Printer (with Appendices) — mentioned by chubot

Tue, 20 Feb 2024 06:58:45 GMT

I think I agree about the testing and labor of complicated translation rules. But it doesn't appear that almost every pretty printer is based on the Wadler algorithm. It seems like MOST of them are not? e.g. clang-format is one of the biggest and best, and it has a model that includes "unwrapped lines", a "layouter", a line break cost function, exhaustive search with memoization, and Dijikstra's algorithm: https://llvm.org/devmtg/2013-04/jasper-slides.pdf The YAPF Python formatter is based on this same algorithm - https://github.com/google/yapf The Dart formatter used a model of "chunks…

Paper and discussion history. A mention is not an endorsement.