Re: Emacs Lisp code formatting

[Campbell Barton <ideasman42@gmail.com>]

On 11/4/21 16:47, Lars Ingebrigtsen wrote:
> Campbell Barton <ideasman42@gmail.com> writes:
> 
>> You could scan external `require' calls, but this means parsing many
>> files to extract the information you need.
> 
> Like with indentation, I think we can assume that the source has been
> loaded.

Not sure what you mean exactly, while developing packages 
functions/macros may change, so I don't think it's reasonable to assume 
the evaluated state in emacs has loaded into memory is up to date.
In general it may be useful to auto-format code that hasn't been 
evaluated too.

>> Note that I use auto-format on save for all my packages (full
>> auto-formatting, not just auto-indent), and personally find it great,
>> but as far as I know I'm the only person doing this.
> 
> I think auto-formatting would be a more complicated thing than a pp for
> code -- it would need to preserve comments, for instance.  A pp for code
> doesn't have to worry about things like that.

For sure, even so, I think getting an initial auto-formatter working is 
a weekend project, getting all the details figured out is a bigger task 
though.

I get the impression most elisp developers prefer to manually format 
their code and use auto-indentation.

Auto formatters are becoming more popular in other languages though, 
clang-format (C/C++), black (for Python)... once you're used to running 
them automatically on save, it feels like a step backwards not to have 
this feature available.