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arxiv 2310.01530 v1 pith:BK67KN3H submitted 2023-10-02 cs.PL

A Pretty Expressive Printer (with Appendices)

classification cs.PL
keywords prettyoptimalityprinterprintersexpressivenessobjectiveprettyexpressivetime
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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Pretty printers make trade-offs between the expressiveness of their pretty printing language, the optimality objective that they minimize when choosing between different ways to lay out a document, and the performance of their algorithm. This paper presents a new pretty printer, $\Pi_e$, that is strictly more expressive than all pretty printers in the literature and provably minimizes an optimality objective. Furthermore, the time complexity of $\Pi_e$ is better than many existing pretty printers. When choosing among different ways to lay out a document, $\Pi_e$ consults a user-supplied cost factory, which determines the optimality objective, giving $\Pi_e$ a unique degree of flexibility. We use the Lean theorem prover to verify the correctness (validity and optimality) of $\Pi_e$, and implement $\Pi_e$ concretely as a pretty printer that we call PrettyExpressive. To evaluate our pretty printer against others, we develop a formal framework for reasoning about the expressiveness of pretty printing languages, and survey pretty printers in the literature, comparing their expressiveness, optimality, worst-case time complexity, and practical running time. Our evaluation shows that PrettyExpressive is efficient and effective at producing optimal layouts. PrettyExpressive has also seen real-world adoption: it serves as a foundation of a code formatter for Racket.

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