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

[Daniel Jasper]

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".

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