indent++

Application Under Development!!!

Software project to perhaps replace GNU indent and allow it to be extendable to other languages, specifically C++.

Navigation: status - news - goals - plans - code - history - links - end navigation.

Status

Currently in planning stages. Some code has been written and released, but only for consumption of those interested in helping rewrite indent.

News

• February 25, 2003 - Release of Design Notes discussing approaches for designing and developing indent.
• December 1, 2002 - Release of source code accomplishing foundation tasks. Currently provides basic command-line option procesing. indent's command line is a project in itself. Read the README file for more information.
• July 23, 2002 - Web page is created, and the project officially starts.

Goals

Design Notes - Ongoing discussion of design and development. Input wanted.

Search for wishes and feature requests on Google.

Plans

Thoughts on program implementation. If you have any suggestions be sure to submit them.

• Rewrite indent from the bottom up.
• Programming Language
  • GNU C (gcc) - most likely
  • GNU C++ (g++) - less likely
  • GNU Fortran - no
• Coding Tools and Libraries
  • lexer: flex
  • parser: bison
  • perfect hashes: gperf
  • regular expressions: rx/regex
  • command-line arguments: argparse, getopt clo++, or Gengetopt
• Formatting Strategies
  • Create powerful and easy-to-use source recognizing and modifying programming tool.
  • Create source recognizing and modifying programming language.
  • Intermediate Form
    • None (brute force and spaghetti coding)
    • Arbitrary (programmer's choice) memory imprint
    • XML
      • Investigate GCC_XML which utilizes gcc's C++ front-end
    • introspecter - the Swiss-Army Knife of source code analysis tools.
• Replace indent

Source Code

This does absolutely nothing to source files! These are first attempts to providing a framework for rewriting indent. Read the README file for more information.

• indent command line code.
  • indent-commandline-0.01.tar.gz (24 kb)
  • indent-commandline-0.01.tar.bz2 (24 kb)
  • indent-commandline-0.01.zip (28 kb)

History of indent (1976!!)

From issue number 35 of the monthly newsletter "Brave Gnu World":

"The history of GNU indent began in 1976 as a part of BSD UNIX in order to be "donated" to the Free Software Foundation later, which makes the program almost as old as Unix itself.

"GNU indent helps improving the readability of C source code and can transduce different types of formating C source code into each other. Since different developers, projects or company very often consider different types of formatting to be most comprehensible, this can be extremely useful. The standard setting of GNU indent is to convert the source code according to the "GNU Coding Standards."

"Additionally, GNU indent may be used to check C syntax and help hunting for bugs and maintaining projects that way.

"The project was written in ANSI C and is released under the GNU General Public License by the FSF; especially its age and flexibility make the program quite special.

Check Out The Copyright

Copyright © 2001 David Ingamells.
Copyright © 1999 Carlo Wood.
Copyright © 1995, 1996 Joseph Arceneaux.
Copyright © 1989, 1992, 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996 Free Software Foundation
Copyright © 1985 Sun Microsystems, Inc.
Copyright © 1980 The Regents of the University of California.
Copyright © 1976 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois.
All rights reserved.

Source Code

Line count (version 2.2.8):

    1079 args.c
      28 args.h
     444 backup.c
      63 backup.h
     860 comments.c
      25 comments.h
     108 globs.c
      36 globs.h
     174 gperf-cc.c
     133 gperf.c
    2627 indent.c
     417 indent.h
     559 io.c
      75 io.h
    1159 lexi.c
     102 lexi.h
    1132 output.c
      51 output.h
     620 parse.c
      32 parse.h
      96 sys.h
     317 wildexp.c
   10137 total

Programmer comments (literally):

     /* Have to do it this way because this piece of shit program doesn't
     * always place the last token code on the stack. */
     

     /* This is bullshit for C code, because
      * normally a label doesn't have breakpoints
      * at all of course.  But in the case of
      * wrong code, not clearing the list can make
      * indent core dump. */
  

Links

• GNU
  • GNU Free Software Foundation Homepage
• indent
  • indent's homepage at gnu.org
  • indent's entry in the GNU directory
  • mailing list for indent bugs
  • indent homepage - Code Beautifcation site by David Ingamells, releases and documentation.
  • indent's old homepage by Carlo Wood - Old releases, redhat packages, change logs, and documentation.
  • indent's Translation Project site - translating output messages using GNU gettext.
• Related
  • Source Highlight - C/C++, Java, Perl, PHP, Prolog, Python to (X)HTML converter.
  • BSD Indent - Pulled out of the academics archives and into an "open source" project. Appears to be some of the original code in GNU indent.

Last modified: $Id: index.html,v 1.11 2003-07-21 16:11:03-04 ashawley Exp $.

Change Log

  $Log: index.html,v $
  Revision 1.11  2003-07-21 16:11:03-04  ashawley
  -Changed link to design notes

  Revision 1.10  2003-04-09 17:56:30-04  ashawley
  - Added introspector note.
  - Now validates.
  - Changed layout.

  Revision 1.9  2003-02-25 18:06:07-05  ashawley
  -Added link to Design Notes.

  Revision 1.8  2003-02-25 17:59:36-05  ashawley
  -Added xml tag.
  -Added revision meta tag.

  Revision 1.7  2003-01-31 14:18:12-05  ashawley
  -Fixed grammatical errors.
  -Fixed HTML errors.
  -Added command-line option possibilities.
  -Added BSD Indent link.

  Revision 1.6  2002/12/17 06:42:50  ashawley
  -"Other" in links changed to "Related".
  -Added link to indent's translation project site.

  Revision 1.5  2002/12/09 09:22:47  ashawley
  -Added a few links.
  -Fixed page anchor XHTML bug (in most browsers) by adding name="foo".

  Revision 1.4  2002/12/01 06:17:26  ashawley
  added Application Under Development!!! at top of page.
  -fixed a few spelling mistakes
  -updated "status" section.
  -added more comments to Plans section
  -added preface to Source Code section.

  Revision 1.3  2002/12/01 05:52:55  ashawley
  -Added first source code (indent-commandline-0.01) in bz2, gz, and zip.
  -Added news sections.

  Revision 1.2  2002/07/23 10:30:41  ashawley
  -Initial contents of the file.
  -Basic organization and navigation of page.
  -History section of indent, and peak at code.
  -Links section.
  -Brainstorming section of how to design indent.