Integrated code formatter

[deadalnix]

On Tuesday, 18 January 2022 at 03:30:53 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> On 1/17/2022 6:06 PM, deadalnix wrote:
>> Modern formatter, such as clang-format, use a parser, but the 
>> parser generates an IR that as nothing to do with the 
>> traditional AST you'd get out of a regular parser.
>
> What comes to mind is what to do with the comments.

Yes, this is the most obvious ones, but then you have, what to do 
with whitespaces? There is a ton of semantic conveyed in 
whitespace, for instance, one new line or two new lines? It gets 
worse when you want to add features such as "don't format that 
specific chunk of code" because now you need ot be able to encode 
EVERYTHING in the AST, and it gets very teddious.