Researchrsc: Gofmt

http://research.swtch.com/2009/12/gofmt.html

by bandris • 17 years ago

33 34 17 years ago

research.swtch.com

aaronblohowiak4• 17 years ago

Why the legacy "fmt" instead of "format" ? Go is a new language, why be held back by the old name conventions?

tspiteri3• 17 years ago

Because it's shorter.

ThinkWriteMute6• 17 years ago

We're not on 80 character terminals anymore. Harddrives are larger than 1.4mb. People need to read this stuff.

"It's shorter" isn't a reason, it's a legacy.

bmm6o• 17 years ago

Using a formatter to easily manage breaking language changes is really clever. I was just reading Pike's interview in Coders at Work where he talked about how all the language changes in the early days of C++ drove him off. This should help Google build up a community while still allowing flexibility.

wglb• 17 years ago

Perhaps you mean Ken Thompson?

marketer2• 17 years ago

One problem with this is that it enforces certain styles upon the programmer. For instance, this function won't compile in go:

    func main() 
    {
        println("hello world")
    }

Instead, if you run gofmt -w on the above code, you get this:

    func main()     { println("hello world!") }

This compiles fine, but it looks ugly.

omouse• 17 years ago

Maybe we can treat Go like assembly language then. Made for a computer to run, not for a person to read. So we'll need a higher level language and less ugly language than Go to write Go.

lsb• 17 years ago

Yes, but that's hardly an auspicious beginning to a language.

dchest3• 17 years ago

Are you sure the first one doesn't compile (provided that you change println to fmt.Println, of course)?

I can compile (with 6g) the hello world example from golang.org with any brace indentation style.

marketer2• 17 years ago

Make sure you're running the latest parser code; do an 'hg sync' on the go tree.

Or you can read the relevant mailing list thread:

http://groups.google.com/group/golang-nuts/browse_thread/thr...

JulianMorrison2• 17 years ago

    func main()
    {

is read as:

    func main();
    {

due to the new semicolon-inserting lexer rules. If you use the gofmt style, you won't notice this breaking change.

DannoHung• 17 years ago

I don't get it. It's a parser that does the output in a particular pretty printed format? If you knew that you wanted to do that from the start, wouldn't you write your compiler parser to be a separate piece of code?

Also, banner indenting style is superior!

gnosis• 17 years ago

I also wonder what all the hoopla is about. So Go now has a prettyprinter. Big f'ing deal. Welcome to the 1980's.

JulianMorrison2• 17 years ago

I love gofmt. I love specifically that in any silly bikeshed-painting argument about code styles, the answer will be "gofmt is definitive, and this conversation is over". If you think it makes mistakes, file a bug. If you don't like it, soldier on. Familiarity will dull the pain.

Oh and, that -r pattern-matching search-and-replace is nice.

Researchrsc: Gofmt

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