On 05/03/2016 09:59 PM, Richard Sandiford wrote:
And sometimes there are multiple acceptable ways of writing the same code. Which wins is an aesthetic choice, which tools tend to be bad at handling. E.g. if a parameter list is too long for a line, there's often a choice of how to balance the parameters across multiple lines, with some being more readable than others. I wouldn't want the one chosen by a formatting tool to be the only acceptable one.
I have all the same reservations about using tools for this. We don't call it "style" for nothing, it is not purely mechanical and until we have general-purpose AI I don't believe computers can do a satisfactory job. I've seen attempts to do so in the past, and they have failed - you invariably end up with humans contorting their code to have it pass the checker, which is entirely counterproductive.
Bernd
