Edge Cases 44: Putting Your Scent on the Code

Andrew Pontious talks with Wolf Rentzsch about editor round-tripping: taking source code with one format, such as K&R-style braces, converting it losslessly to another format, and back. Are the trade-offs worth it?

Links:

• Hardcastle and McCormick « Wikipedia
• Round-trip engineering « Wikipedia
• The Tabs and Spaces of Outrageous Fortune « Edge Cases
• Abstract syntax tree « Wikipedia
• Parse tree « Wikipedia
• Uncrustify - Source Code Beautifier for C-like languages
• Andrew Pontious tweet: “Being a naughty child is great practice for being a QA engineer. Not listening to “don’t touch that!” and “leave that alone!””

Rejected Episode Titles:

• Why Don’t We Talk About Having a Shorter Show a Little More
• I See My Cat Has an Opinion
• This Terrible, Terrible Format
• The Mid-Nineties Holy Grail
• That’s the Last We’ll Be Talking About UML
• Very Specific, Very Peculiar Ways
• A Dagwood Sandwich of Methods and Comments
• Regularized the Heck out of Them
• NOT HyperCard
• Or a Cat Got on the Keyboard
• No One Should Get Excited
• It Feels Like Hundreds
• Stamping out All of the Idiosyncrasies
• My Quite Bubbly, Enthusiastic Take
• The Bad Old Days of Project Builder
• A C Source File That’s Shaped like the Death Star
• Like a Recursive Can of Worms
• The Way to Be a Happy Engineer
• Urinating on the Code, Metaphorically