Another formatter, derived from Jalopy

[Meskauskas Audrius]

Hello all,

Two months ago, being new with Classpatch, I was looking for a suitable
formatting tool. From all free open source tools I tried, the Jalopy was the
most promising. However I was not able to force it to indent the
if/while/for constructs correctly. While it has a separate option "GNU
style", in this style, it indents the braces but does not indents content
AGAIN. There were also some smaller problems like always removing space
between the copyright comment and the package header.

As a result, I was forced to work with the Jalopy sources. Jalopy has a well
written parsing part that suits for all cases and the formatting part. By
modifiying the formatting part, it is possible to get very variable styles,
much more variable that it could be done by modifying the option file.

I think it would more be clever to agree on some style, supported by the
accessible formatting tool, maintained by some other team being interested
only on it, and not to use our specialised tools as writing them may be
outside the Classpath project scope. It is also crucial to have
an agreed option file and do not raise critics demanding features
that the once agreed tools and once agreed options file cannot
provide. The new developers could effectively learn from they own
code, formatted by this tool.

However if this cannot be achieved because of any reason, I can also suggest
the results of my work. This modified Jalopy version seems formatting closer
to the style, commonly found in Classpath. If it is interesting, you can
download my formatter from the following URLS:

http://mypage.bluewin.ch/audrius/cft/src.zip (modified part only)
http://mypage.bluewin.ch/audrius/cft/jalopy-1.0b10.jar (modified)
http://mypage.bluewin.ch/audrius/cft/configuration.xml
http://mypage.bluewin.ch/audrius/cft/Parser.java (formatting example, no
keyboard touch after formatting)

Jalopy has numerous plug-ins for various development tools. They
usually have jalopy-1.0b10.jar or similary named file that can be just 
replaced,
getting the new plug-in version.

Regards

Audrius