Fabulous Adventures in Data Structures and Algorithms

9 Greedy iterative pretty printing

This chapter covers

• Defining the “pretty-printing” problem
• Using greedy algorithms to find nonoptimal solutions quickly
• Avoiding deep recursion through explicit stacks
• Separating concerns with the visitor pattern

Modern editors for software developers usually provide automatic code formatting for a variety of languages. This feature is particularly useful for languages with weak rules for using spaces and line breaks. Languages such as C, Java, and C# don’t care at all whether you write terse code like this

double Frob(int x){int y = Qux(x); return Rezrov(y+1);}

or some goofy thing like this:

  double Frob(int x)
{ int y = Qux(  x);
    return Rezrov(y +1 )  ; }

In many languages, programmers have ...