bridoc-api.md

BriDoc nodes/Smart constructors and their semantics

At this point, you should have a rough idea of what the involved types mean. This leaves us to explain the different BriDoc (smart) constructors and their exact semantics.

Special nodes

• docDebug/BDDebug

  Like the trace statement of the BriDoc type. It does not affect the normal output, but prints stuff to stderr when the transformation traverses this node.

• BDExternal is used for original-source reproduction.

Basic nodes

• docEmpty/BDEmpty Text

  ""

  The empty document. Has empty output. Should never affect layouting.

• docLit/BDLit

  "a" "Maybe" "("

  The most basic building block - a simple string. Has nothing to do with literals in the parsing sense. Will always be produces as-is in the output. It must be free of newline characters and should normally be free of any spaces (because those would never be considered for line-breaking - but there are cases where this makes sense still).

• docSeq/BDSeq [BriDoc]

  "func foo = 13"

  A in-line/horizontal sequence of sub-docs. The sub-documents should not contain any newlines, but there is an exception: The last element of the sequence may be multi-line. In combination with docSetBaseY this allows for example:

  foo | bar = 1
      | baz = 2

  which is represented roughly like

  docSeq
    "foo"
    space
    docSetBaseY
      docLines
        stuff that results in "| bar = 1"
        stuff that results in "| baz = 2"
  

  But in general it should be preferred to use docPar to handle multi-line sub-nodes, where possible.

• docAlt/BDAlt [BriDoc]

  Specify multiple alternative layouts. Take care to appropriately maintain sharing for the documents representing the children of the current node.

  See the "Controlling layouting" section below.

• docAltFilter

  simple utility wrapper around docAlt: Each alternative is accompanied by a boolean; if False the alternative is discarded.

• docPar :: m BriDocNumbered -> m BriDocNumbered -> m BriDocMumbered

  (does not completely match BDPar, which has an extra argument.)

  Describes a "paragraph" - a layout consisting of some headline (which may contain newlines, although it rarely does) and content (that may contain newlines). Simple example is a do-block:

  do -- headline
    stmt -- content
    stmt -- content
    stmt -- content

  But let us first consider the simplest case: docPar (docLit "foo") (docLit "bar") placed at the start of the line; it will be layouted like this:

  foo
  bar

  As you can see, the content is not indented by default. In this form, docPar a b behaves like docLines [a,b], and docPar a (docLines bs) like docLines (a:bs). What makes docPar special is that it allows differing indentation of headline and content, where the lines of docLines are supposed to have the same indentation.

  This allows two common uses of docPar:

  1. The pattern docAddBaseY BrIndentRegular $ docPar _ _. Here docAddBaseY does not affect the current line (i.e. the headline of docPar) but it does indent the content.

  2. At the end of a sequence; the following is valid and common: docSeq [elem1, elem2, docPar elem3 content] which looks like

     elem1 elem2 elem3
     content

     So the headline does not need occur at the start of the line.

  This interaction between docSeq, docAddBaseY, and docPar allows us to add indentation to the content of a childnode without even knowing if that childnode will actually make use of docPar. We can simply use docAddBaseY BrIndentRegular $ docSeq [foo, bar, childNodeDoc] and get sensible layout including indentation of the potential content-part of the child node. Such a behaviour would not be possible without this interaction unless we resorted to analysing the doc created for the childnode - which would lead to complex special-casing.

  foo bar child-oneline
  -- or
  foo bar child-headline
    child-content

  This pattern does however requires that we keep this interaction in mind when writing the layouting of such parent/childnode relationships. For example using docLines in the child node instead of docPar would probably lead to bad results if the parent used docAddBaseY.

• docLines/BDLines

  Where docSeq is horizontal sequence, docLines is the vertical sequence operator. docLines has one important requirement: All lines must have the same indentation. Violating this will lead to undefined layouting behaviour.

  As a consequence, there are two valid usage patterns:

  1. docLines is used at the start of a line, e.g. as the content of a docPar.

  2. The docSetBaseY $ docLines _ or docSetBaseAndIndent $ docNonBottomSpacing $ docLines _ patterns allow using docLines as a final element of a sequence; the docSetBase~ constructs ensure that the rest-lines are indented as much as the headline. An example is:

     foo | bar = 1
         | baz = 2

     where "| bar = 1" and "| bar = 2" are two lines of a docLines.

• docSeparator/BDSeparator

  Adds a space, unless it is the last element in a line. Also merges with other separators and has no effect if inserted right after inserting space (e.g. in the start of a line when indented) or if already indented due to horizontal alignment.

  Note also this helper:

  appSep :: ToBriDocM BriDocNumbered -> ToBriDocM BriDocNumbered
  appSep x = docSeq [x, docSeparator]

Creating horizontal alignment

• docCols/BDCols ColSig [BriDoc]

  This works like docSeq, but adds horizontal alignment if possible. The implementation involves a lot of special-case trickeries and I assume that it is impossible to specify the exact semantics. But the rough idea is: If

  1. horizontal alignment is not turned off via global config
  2. there are consecutive lines (created e.g. by docLines or docPar) and
  3. both lines consist of docCols (where "consist" can ignore certain shallow wrappers like docAddBaseY) and
  4. the two ColSigs are equal and
  5. the two docCols contain an equal number of children and
  6. there is enough horizontal space to insert the additional spaces

  then the contained docs will be aligned horizontally.

  And further, if there are multiple lines so that consecutive pairs fulfill these requirements, the whole block will be aligned to the same horizontal tabs.

  And further, if a docCols contains another docCols, and the docCols in the next line also does, and the child docCols also match in ColSigs and have the same number of arguments and so on, then the children's children are also aligned horizontally.

  And of course this nesting also works over blocks built of matching consecutive pairs.

  Wait, was this not supposed to be broadly simplifying? Well.. it is. uhm. Let us just.. example.. an example seems fine.

  Considering the following declaration/formatting:

  func (MyLongFoo abc def) = 1
  func (Bar       a   d  ) = 2
  func _                   = 3

  Note how the "=" are aligned over all three lines, and the patterns in the first two lines are as well, but the pattern in the third line is just a structureless underscore?

  The representation behind that source is something in the direction of this (heavily simplified and not exact at all; e.g. spaces are not represented at all):

  docLines
    docCols equationSigToken
      "func"
      docCols patternSigToken
        "("
        "MyLongFoo"
        "abc"
        "def"
        ")"
      docSeq
        "="
        "1"
    docCols equation
      "func"
      docCols patternSigToken
        "("
        "Bar"
        "a"
        "d"
        ")"
      docSeq
        "="
        "2"
    docCols equation
      "func"
      "_"
      docSeq
        "="
        "3"
  

Controlling indentation level

Firstly, we keep track of two slightly different notions of indentation, indicated by the terms "Base" and "Indent".

The latter is used for indentation levels that affect parsing (i.e. for those instances where haskell is layout-sensitive). Consequently "Indent" is changed exactly in those cases where the "off-side rule" applies (see the "Layout" chapter in the haskell 2010 report). This indentation level is important for comments, as comments in ghc-exactprint have positions relative to the this "Indent".

"Base" on the other hand refers to all other indentation happening.

• docAddBaseY/BDAddBaseY

  Does not affect the current line, but anything after a newline (e.g. when the child is a docPar).

  Stacking more than one of these will combine the two indentation-amounts using maximum, not addition.

• docSetBaseY

  Sets the "Base" to the current "cursor position", i.e. with the docSetBaseY (docLines ..) pattern the lines will line up to the left.

• docSetIndentLevel

  Similar to docSetBaseY, but for "Indent".

• docSetBaseAndIndent

  Literally docSetBaseY . docSetIndentLevel.

• docEnsureIndent (this really should be named docAddEnsureBaseAndIndent unless I forgot some detail.)

  This adds to both Base and Indent, and immediately applies this as well. This is in contrast to the other operations that only have an effect after the first newline occuring in the child node. If the cursor is currently left of the new indentation level, spaces will be inserted, and new lines will be indented (at least) as far, too.

Controlling layouting

The purpose of these nodes/modifiers is affecting the choices of alternatives (see docAlt) made. For example in a bridoc tree like

docAlt
  docForceSingleLine
    [stuff]
  [otherOption]

if stuff only returns layouts that use multiple lines, then this alternative will not be considered, and this will be effectively simplified to just [otherOption].

• docNonBottomSpacing

  Enforces that this node is not discarded even when all considered layouts use more space than available. This counteracts the fact that we consider a limited amount of layouts in order to retain linear runtime. Bad usage of this modifier will lead to unnecessary overflow over the max-columns (80 by default) even when other layoutings were available.

  [TODO: consideration of valid usecases]

• docSetParSpacing and docForceParSpacing

  We say a node has "ParSpacing" if it looks like a docPar result.. it has a headline and (indented) content in new lines. This property can propagate somewhat non-trivially upwards and is used by certain parents. It mainly provides nice layouting choices in cases such as:

  foo = abc $ def $ do
    stmt
    stmt

  Consider what we know when translating the equation: We have two possibilites:

  foo = child-node-doc -- note that child may contain a docPar.
  -- or
  foo =
    child-node-doc

  As usual, we do not to inspect child-node-doc; this makes deciding between the two choices hard. Looking at is-single/multi-line is not sufficient.

  Instead we define a new property (I'll call it "has_par_spacing" here) that propagates appropriately upwards:

  has_par_spacing(setParSpacing(_)).
  has_par_spacing(docSeq[_, .., x]) :- has_par_spacing(x).
  has_par_spacing(docCols[_, .., x]) :- has_par_spacing(x).
  has_par_spacing(docNonBottomSpacing(x)) :- has_par_spacing(x).
  has_par_spacing(docAddBaseY(x)) :- has_par_spacing(x).

  and so on for other simple unary wrappers. (i hope my sloppy prolog is not too confusing.)

• docForceSingleline

  Discards child layouts that contain newlines.

• docForceMultiline

  Discards child layouts lacking newlines.

Inserting comments / Controlling comment placement

For many cases it is sufficient to use the following construct to insert comments into the output:

• docWrapNode

  Inserts all comments associated above this node above the node, and all other comments below. Works on simple nodes, but also on lists and Seqs of nodes.

ghc-exactprint does not associate all comments to the exactly preceding node and instead tries to associate to the "logically connected" node. This behaviour is desirable when considering automatic refactoring, think of moving a function and the comment above the function along with it. But not even this is sufficient - there exist comments that need to be inserted in the middle of a syntactical construct, for example consider the pattern Foo{{- we don't care about fields! -}}. Here, the comment is placed between keywords (or "keysymbols" or whatever) that do not have separate nodes in the syntax tree. ghc-exactprint captures such comment in some way that allows inserting them back properly.

The logic used here is determined by the ghc-exactprint design. The core type is the Annotation type

• docAnnotationPrior
• docAnnotationKW
• docAnnotationRest

To match this, there are special comment-insertion nodes in the BriDoc type that allow for fine-grained control of where specific comments are inserted. "Prior" refers to the same annPriorComments annotation field. "KW" refers to the annsDP field. "Rest" refers to all remaining (i.e. not-yet-inserted; brittany keeps track of which have already been processed) comments, including the annFollowingComments field.

Deprecated

• BDForwardLineMode is unused and apparently should be deprecated.
• BDProhibitMTEL is deprecated