A Pretty Good Formatting Pipeline

Abstract

Proper formatting makes the structure of a program apparent and aids program comprehension. The need to format code arises in code generation and transformation, as well as in normal reading and editing situations. Commonly used pretty-printing tools in transformation frameworks provide an easy way to produce indented code that is fairly readable for humans, without reaching the level of purpose-built reformatting tools, such as those built into IDEs. This paper presents a library of pluggable components, built to support style-based formatting and reformatting of code, and to enable further experimentation with code formatting.