Stable, flexible, peephole pretty-printing

Programmers working on large software systems are faced with an extremely complex, information-rich environment. To help navigate through this, modern development environments allow flexible, multi-window browsing and exploration of the source code. Our focus in this paper is on pretty-printing algorithms that can display source code in useful, appealing ways in a variety of styles. Our algorithm is flexible, stable, and peephole-efficient. It is flexible in that it is capable of screenoptimized layouts that support source code visualization techniques such as fisheye views. The algorithm is peephole-efficient, in that it performs work proportional to the size of the visible window and not the size of the entire file. Finally, the algorithm is stable, in that the rendered view is identical to that which would be produced by formatting the entire file. This work has 2 benefits. First, it enables rendering of source codes in multiple fonts and font sizes at interactive speeds. Second, i...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2008
• Where: SCP
• Authors: Stoney Jackson, Premkumar T. Devanbu, Kwan-Liu Ma
• Keywords: Algorithm, Interactive Speeds, SCP 2008, Source Codes