research-article

Open access

A pretty but not greedy printer (functional pearl)

Author:

Jean-Philippe BernardyAuthors Info & Claims

Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages, Volume 1, Issue ICFP

Article No.: 6, Pages 1 - 21

https://doi.org/10.1145/3110250

Published: 29 August 2017 Publication History

PDF eReader

Abstract

This paper proposes a new specification of pretty printing which is stronger than the state of the art: we require the output to be the shortest possible, and we also offer the ability to align sub-documents at will. We argue that our specification precludes a greedy implementation. Yet, we provide an implementation which behaves linearly in the size of the output. The derivation of the implementation demonstrates functional programming methodology.

References

[1]

Pablo R. Azero and S. Doaitse Swierstra. 1998. Optimal Pretty Printing Combinators. (1998). Submitted to ICFP 1998.

Google Scholar

[2]

Richard Bird and Oege de Moor. 1997. Algebra of programming. Prentice-Hall, Inc. http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id= 248932

Google Scholar

[3]

Kalyanmoy Deb, Karthik Sindhya, and Jussi Hakanen. 2016. Multi-objective optimization. In Decision Sciences: Theory and Practice. CRC Press, 145–184.

Crossref

Google Scholar

[4]

John Hughes. 1995. The Design of a Pretty-printing Library. In Advanced Functional Programming, First International Spring School on Advanced Functional Programming Techniques-Tutorial Text. Springer-Verlag, 53–96. http://portal.acm.org/ citation.cfm?id=734154

Crossref

Google Scholar

[5]

Conor McBride and Ross Paterson. 2007. Applicative programming with effects. Journal of Functional Programming 18, 01 (2007), 1–13.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[6]

Anton Podkopaev and Dmitri Boulytchev. 2014. Polynomial-Time Optimal Pretty-Printing Combinators with Choice. In Perspectives of System Informatics - 9th International Ershov Informatics Conference, PSI 2014, St. Petersburg, Russia, June 24-27, 2014. Revised Selected Papers. 257–265.

Crossref

Google Scholar

[7]

S. Doaitse Swierstra and Olaf Chitil. 2009. Linear, bounded, functional pretty-printing. Journal of Functional Programming 19, 01 (2009), 1–16.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[8]

Philip Wadler. 1987. A critique of Abelson and Sussman or why calculating is better than scheming. ACM SIGPLAN Notices 22, 3 (1987), 83–94.

Digital Library

Google Scholar

[9]

Philip Wadler. 2003. A prettier printer. Palgrave MacMillan, 223–243.

Crossref

Google Scholar

Cited By

View all

Porncharoenwase SPombrio JTorlak E(2023)A Pretty Expressive PrinterProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/36228377:OOPSLA2(1122-1149)Online publication date: 16-Oct-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3622837
Omar CMoon DBlinn AVoysey ICollins NChugh RFreund SYahav E(2021)Filling typed holes with live GUIsProceedings of the 42nd ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation10.1145/3453483.3454059(511-525)Online publication date: 19-Jun-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3453483.3454059
Matsuda KWang M(2018)FliPpr: A System for Deriving Parsers from Pretty-PrintersNew Generation Computing10.1007/s00354-018-0033-736:3(173-202)Online publication date: 27-Aug-2018
https://doi.org/10.1007/s00354-018-0033-7

Index Terms

A pretty but not greedy printer (functional pearl)
1. Mathematics of computing
  1. Discrete mathematics
    1. Combinatorics
      1. Combinatorial optimization
2. Software and its engineering
  1. Software notations and tools
    1. General programming languages
      1. Language types
        Functional languages

Recommendations

A Pretty Expressive Printer

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 ...
Using the new common Lisp pretty printer

Although not part of the initial definition of the language, pretty printing has been an important feature of Lisp programming environments for twenty years or more [1]. By the time Common Lisp was being defined, the importance of pretty printing was ...
An Abstract Pretty Printer

The author has distilled the basic operations of the pretty printer into an abstract pretty printer that uses procedural parameters to perform low-level printing actions. By encapsulating the algorithm in one place, all the pretty-printing utilities ...

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages

Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages Volume 1, Issue ICFP

September 2017

1173 pages

EISSN:2475-1421

DOI:10.1145/3136534

Issue’s Table of Contents

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs International 4.0 License.

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 29 August 2017

Published in PACMPL Volume 1, Issue ICFP

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tag

Pretty printing

Qualifiers

Research-article

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

3
Total Citations
View Citations
1,232
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)123
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)16

Reflects downloads up to 15 Oct 2024

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

View all

Porncharoenwase SPombrio JTorlak E(2023)A Pretty Expressive PrinterProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/36228377:OOPSLA2(1122-1149)Online publication date: 16-Oct-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3622837
Omar CMoon DBlinn AVoysey ICollins NChugh RFreund SYahav E(2021)Filling typed holes with live GUIsProceedings of the 42nd ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation10.1145/3453483.3454059(511-525)Online publication date: 19-Jun-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3453483.3454059
Matsuda KWang M(2018)FliPpr: A System for Deriving Parsers from Pretty-PrintersNew Generation Computing10.1007/s00354-018-0033-736:3(173-202)Online publication date: 27-Aug-2018
https://doi.org/10.1007/s00354-018-0033-7

View Options

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

PDF

eReader

View online with eReader.

eReader

Get Access

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Abstract

References

Cited By

Index Terms

Recommendations

A Pretty Expressive Printer

Using the new common Lisp pretty printer

An Abstract Pretty Printer

Comments

Information

Published In

Publisher

Publication History

Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tag

Qualifiers

Contributors

Other Metrics

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

Other Metrics

Citations

Cited By

View options

PDF

eReader

Get Access

Login options

Full Access

Figures

Other

Share

Share this Publication link

Share on social media

Affiliations