Catch Source Code Errors - Tricks Wanted

[John Tamplin]

This is sortof off the subject, but one problem I have always had when
working on team projects was differences in coding style.  Typically each
person wrote in their own style, so you wound up with a mess of different
styles which really makes the code hard to read.  Sometimes, people would
reformat bits of code (usually fixes applied by someone else) to their own
style, something that especially trashes RCS-type programs, since there are
a lot of changes to lines in the program that aren't changes as far as the
compiler is concerned.

A tool I have always wanted to build, but have never had (made) time for is
this:  a version of RCS which canonicalizes (is that a word?) the source as
it is checked in.  When a user checks out a ocpy of the file, the program
checks an environment variable or some ~/.xxx file to discover the user's style
preferences.  That way, each person can inspect code in their favorite style,
without impacting any other team members' ability to do the same.  The file
could be stored as a normal program, or the version control system might
choose to store it in some kind of tokenized form to ease reassembly into
different styles.

Maybe one of these days I will actually write it.

-- 
John Tamplin						Xavax
jat at xavax.COM						2104 West Ferry Way
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