Re: [Caml-list] Format OCaml Code

[Gabriel Scherer <gabriel.scherer@gmail.com>]

Camlp4 parses Ocaml source, and can reprint it. You can't customize
the output much, it's defined by the pretty-printer (but you could
write your own pretty-printer), and it probably doesn't correspond to
your own OCaml style. If you're only looking for a way to normalize
indentation, you may be happy with that.

  camlp4o file.ml (* outputs in the console *)
  camlp4o file.ml -o output.ml

Note that piping/redirection `camlp4o file.ml > foo` doesn't work as
camlp4o sends a marshalled AST by default.
An issue with camlp4 is that it can sometimes move comments a bit: the
placement of comments in the reformatted source is approximative *with
respect to whitespace* (you sometimes have a blank inserted between a
phrase and the comment). That is not really an issue for the human
reader, but it tends to confuse `ocamldoc`, which relies on whitespace
heuristics to know which phrase a comment documents. You should think
twice if you wish to use both camlp4 and ocamldoc at the same time.

If you wanted to write your own pretty-printer (as a Camlp4 printer,
or based on your own or another parser), you could be interested in:
- The [Pprint] module of François Pottier, an interesting adaptation
of Daan Leijen's Haskell PPrint library
   http://pauillac.inria.fr/~fpottier/
- The [easy-format] library of Martin Jambon
   http://martin.jambon.free.fr/easy-format.html
- The [Format] module of the standard library
   http://caml.inria.fr/resources/doc/guides/format.en.html

I have only used Format and Pprint, and prefer Pprint (simpler to
understand and use).


On Fri, Dec 23, 2011 at 9:04 AM, Mihamina Rakotomandimby
<mihamina@rktmb.org> wrote:
> On 12/23/2011 10:57 AM, haihao shen wrote:
>>
>> Hi All,
>>
>> Does anyone know whether there is some tools or scripts to format ocaml
>> code in a unified format?
>
>
> If you mean having a "good" indentation, opening it in Emacs+tuareg-mode
> then indenting will work fine.
>
> Note that it's a file by file way and it doesn not split uselessly long
> lines to shorter ones: just indentation. Or I dont know how to fully use
> tuareg-mode ;-).
>
> For a large set of files, I don't know how to ease the work.
>
>
> --
> RMA.
>
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