[cfe-dev] clang-format and "ASCII art" formatting

[Nico Weber]

On Fri, Dec 7, 2012 at 9:54 AM, Daniel Jasper <djasper at google.com> wrote:
> First of all, I personally agree and I would not use this feature.
> Obviously, if companies / projects decide not to it, they don't have
> to (we can build style / runtime / compile options into clang-format
> to forbid it).
>
> I guess, I am actually asking more specifically about the LLVM project
> itself and whether it would benefit from such an option. I want to
> prevent a situation where an LLVM/Clang developer would like to use
> clang-format, "but it always messes up this one part so badly".

Wouldn't that just be a bug in the formatter though? Do you think
there are many cases it just won't be able to get right? The code you
linked to looks like something an automated formatter should be able
to produce.

>
> On Fri, Dec 7, 2012 at 6:49 PM, Manuel Klimek <klimek at google.com> wrote:
>> On Fri, Dec 7, 2012 at 6:40 PM, Nico Weber <thakis at chromium.org> wrote:
>>>
>>> On Fri, Dec 7, 2012 at 8:18 AM, Daniel Jasper <djasper at google.com> wrote:
>>> > Hi all,
>>> >
>>> > although I think we can make clang-format (clang/lib/Format) format more
>>> > and
>>> > more pieces of C++ according to a specific style, I am convinced that
>>> > there
>>> > are cases where automatic formatting is not the right solution.
>>> >
>>> > An example is:
>>> > http://clang.llvm.org/doxygen/ParseExpr_8cpp-source.html line 60-90.
>>> > Here,
>>> > careful human thought leads to much more readable code then simply
>>> > following
>>> > a style guide.
>>> >
>>> > In order to handle such cases and still be able to auto-format entire
>>> > files,
>>> > I propose to add certain markers around areas of a file that
>>> > clang-format
>>> > should not touch.
>>>
>>> In my opinion, the main advantage of an autoformatter is that its
>>> output can be declared as canonical and that in organizations that do
>>> that nobody needs to argue about indentation anymore. If you provide a
>>> formatting escape hatch, you lose that property.
>>
>>
>> This feature would not benefit organizations as much as it might benefit
>> small open source projects.
>>
>> Cheers,
>> /Manuel