week full of refactor

My Project has grown a lot now, we are officially going to support  C, C++, python3, JS, CSS and JAVA with our generic algorithms, though they’ll still be experimental owing to the nature of the bears.

The past two weeks were heavily concentrating on refactoring algorithms of the AnnotationBear and IndentationBear, the IndentationBear received only small fixes while the AnnotationBear had to undergo a change in the algorithm, the new and improved algorithm also adds the feature of distinguishing between single-line and multi-line strings while earlier there were just strings.

The IndentationBear is almost close to completion barring basic things like:

• It still messes up your doc strings/ multi-line strings.
• Still no support for keyword indents.

the next weeks efforts will go into introducing various indentation styles into the bear and fixing these issues, before we move on to the LineBreakBear and the FormatCodeBear.

tabs spaces tabs

Last time i was able to come up with an algorithm to indent python code or basically code without  un-indent specifiers.  This time the challenge was tackling hanging indentation.

Now hanging indents in terms of word processing occur when all the lines except the first line are indented. In code terms it is something like this:

some_function(
    param1,
    param2,
    param3)

here param1, param2, param3 are indented while some_function is not.

Again the algorithm i use do hanging indentation is pretty straight forward, in simple terms it is:

• Check if there is text to the right of paranthesis.
• If there is, indent all lines till closing paranthesis that the column right after paranthesis.
• Otherwise calculate the indentation relative to some_function and indent all later prams to that level.

This is the broad algorithm i use.

Though the difficult part was actually aligning in the file. N0w i align my files in the correct indentation levels(barring hanging indents) by:

• remove all whitespaces to the left of every line.

I have a list called indentation_levels  which has indentation corresponding to line number, and also a variable insert which is either ‘\t’ or  tab_width*’ ‘  where tab_width is the number of spaces to indent

• to each line add insert*indentation_level[line] to the left of the line.

basically line -> insert*indentation_level[line] + line .

now the problem was to insert absolute_indentation_levels in between normal indentation.

So whats the problem? just add number of spaces along with the normal spaces right? WRONG!

there’s a difference between

\t        \t
and 
        \t\t
are different

real life example:

class {
\tfunction(param1{
\t        \t do_something();}
\t         param2)
}

i was able to accomplish this by:

• storing the previous indentation.of a block
• then adding previous indent + hanging indent + indent level of that line.

do tell me if you find any fault in these algorithms, my work has recently been merged and can be found as the IndentationBear in the master branch of the coala-bears repositiory.