yes. [Re: Do you trust the "indent" program?]

Ozan Yigit oz at yunexus.yorku.ca
Thu Dec 27 17:49:02 AEST 1990


In article <12184 at sybase.sybase.com> forrest at sybase.com writes:
>Do you trust 'indent'
>enough to run it on all your source file without making any mistakes?

Yes. Ever since the famous assignment bug was fixed, I ran literally
hundreds of thousands of lines of code through indent [the one that
was posted] and on randomly paranoid occasions, I compared binaries.

[at this point, I stopped, went to a system running SunOS 4.0.3, and ran
/bin/indent on a recently arrived 63 files containing 110,000 lines of
awful C code, compiled the result, and diffed against the first binary
I had created earlier. No differences were found.]

Nowadays, almost any piece of foreign code actually goes through indent
before I ever look at it. [Almost all such code looks better afterwards :-)]

I think there exists versions of indent, including the one included in the
latest Berkeley distributions, and the one posted to comp.sources.unix,
and probably the one hacked for GNU, that are basically reliable in terms
of one-to-one translation. Any unreliable versions should be flushed.

oz
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