Pretty Printer
Stratego -- Strategies for Program Transformation
A
pretty printer is a mapping from terms to text. If this is done in a nice way, i.e., layout is placed in appropriate places, the formatter deserves the term
pretty printer. For some applications, e.g., inspecting an intermediate term in a transformation pipeline, an
ugly printer is sufficient.
pretty printers can be defined manually, but that is a lot of work. A better way is to use an intermediate format for representing layout instructions and leaving the actual formatting to a tool that knows about it.
The
generic pretty printing (gpp) package that comes with
StrategoXT provides tools for translating terms to the
Box language? and formatting the
Box language? to text, html, and latex. The package even supports generation of
pretty print tables from
SDF syntax definitions.
If you need more control over pretty printing you can also write a
pretty printer with
StrategoBox. This approach uses
concrete syntax for the
Box language? inside the
Stratego language.
CategoryPrettyPrint?