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Indentation and Visual Studio?
f#ocaml

Hi,

I am porting an ocaml game ([link:freetennis.sf.net)] to .NET and F#. I am using VIsual Studio 2005. I was wondering what editor or tool do people use for automatic indentation (AKA format document). Control-K, Control-D does not seem to work. I can indent the code with Emacs and Tuareg mode, and then reload the document in Visual Studio, but this is not very practical. Inserting tabs or spaces by hand is even less practical. Editing the whole code with Emacs is feasible, but I don't have Intellisense. So I was wondering what people generally do. Thanks a lot!

Maurizio

.

Maybe I should reformulate the question. What editor or tool do you use to write F# code? And to format/indent it? Thanks [:)]

By on 7/25/2007 1:28 AM ()

Hi there,

I use Visual Studio with 2-space indent and "tab to spaces". I believe you can still get a 180-day free trial of VS from Microsoft, and also there is the SQL Developer Edition for $80 which supports adding the F# plugin. The interactive type checking is also superb. The project system is imperfect, as is being discussed elsewhere in the hub.

The key for formatting F# code in VS is to realize that you can highlight large blocks of code in Visual Studio and press "tab" or "shift-tab" to indent the entire highlighted block in/out. This makes it fairly straight-forward to indent code manually. However some kind of automatic indentation is definitely on the cards.

Kind regards

don

By on 7/25/2007 7:17 AM ()

Resurrecting an old thread. I've found that one of the more frequent bugs I make is misaligning lines when using #light syntax. It's frustrating to spend several hours to find an extra space somewhere, so I'm thinking of using the "non light" syntax.

Can Visual Studio 2008 automatically format non-light code now? For the #light syntax one thing I see that can help to this is implementing of the code folding, but this is another story.

By on 5/9/2009 11:36 AM ()

There is no auto-formatting.

I find the 'guidelines' VS feature very helpful:

[link:blogs.msdn.com]

I use 4-space indentation, and have:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

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[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\9.0\Text Editor]
"Guides"="RGB(185,175,175) 4, 8, 12, 16, 20, 24, 28, 80"
By on 5/9/2009 12:21 PM ()

This doesn't work in VS2010, but this is a plugin that works

[link:visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com]

You still need to set the columns in the registry

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[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\10.0\Text Editor]
"Guides"="RGB(185,175,175) 4, 8, 12, 16, 20, 24, 28, 80"
By on 3/16/2011 4:15 AM ()

See also

[link:lorgonblog.wordpress.com]

as another flexible tool for inspecting F# column indents.

By on 3/16/2011 9:50 AM ()

Thanks for the tip, will try it. I really do suffer from accidentally hitting a space while browsing/massaging the code and then spend a lot of time figuring out the bug.

A nice feature, in my opinion, would be a translator between light and non-light syntax. Un-lighting the code will allow IDE to format it so that I can figure out how the compiler parses it. Also it's similar to latex vs word choice - I would prefer writing non-light so that IDE be able to format the code, but would covert it to light for reading/publishing.

Btw, is there any Tuareg/caml custom emacs modes for F# that would allow formating non-light code?

Thanks,

Vlad

By on 5/12/2009 5:58 PM ()

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