Wolfram Language formatter

[maxitg]

The problem

Wolfram Language formatting should be included in the ./lint.sh script and run in the git hooks and CI.

Possible solution

There are two candidates I am aware of:

• Official Wolfram formatter: https://github.com/WolframResearch/codeformatter
• A formatter made by @lshifr: https://github.com/lshifr/CodeFormatter

The official formatter seems to have some trouble with respecting the specified line width. If not fixed, that will make it unusable as it will be in conflict with ./checkLineWidth.sh.

The formatter by @Lshift has another issue in that it formats the code for the StandardForm, which means there are, e.g., no spaces around + or @.

It's not clear which of these issues is easier to fix, so the one we pick will depend on that.

[lshifr]

The official formatter might be a more future-proof solution in the long term. OTOH, for my version, in principle it should be easier to write extensions with specific formatting rules (which is a state I've been originally planning to bring it to) , since it is all written in top-level WL and has zero dependencies.

Depending on the time frame when this is needed, I may be able to fix specific issues mentioned - I do have some uncommitted work in progress.

[maxitg]

Thanks for your reply, @lshifr!

I tried using your formatter on one of our files, and there are quite a few issues. Here is what it looks like (see the last cell):

CodeFormatterTesting-01.nb.zip

Some of the issues:

• An empty line in the beginning.
• No spaces before or after ->, = and commas.
• The string in SetUsage exceeds the width limit.
• A comma appeared and spaces disappeared from the (* options processing *) and other comments.
• Semicolons on the new lines.

If you already have something that fixes these issues, it would be great if you could push it. But otherwise, I'm going to focus on other issues for the time being (the official formatter has serious issues as well, e.g., it does not seem to respect the line width whatsoever).