SMIE: Weakness is Power!: Auto-indentation with incomplete information

TL;DR

SMIE offers a robust approach to automatic code indentation that works effectively even with incomplete or erroneous code by leveraging local parsing techniques, enhancing editor resilience.

Contribution

The paper introduces SMIE, a novel indentation engine that uses local parsing to handle incomplete or broken code, improving indentation accuracy in challenging scenarios.

Findings

Enables indentation with incomplete or erroneous code

Provides graceful degradation in parsing accuracy

Improves robustness of code editors

Abstract

Automatic indentation of source code is fundamentally a simple matter of parsing the code and then applying language- and style-specific rules about relative indentation of the various constructs. Yet, in practice, full parsing is not always an option, either because of quirks of the language, or because the code is temporarily syntactically incorrect, or because of an incomplete or broken grammar. I present the design of Emacs's Simple-Minded Indentation Engine (SMIE), which gets its power from the weakness of the underlying parsing technique. It makes it possible to perform local parsing, which is hence unaffected by irrelevant surrounding code. This provides a form of graceful degradation in the face of incomplete, erroneous, or just plain problematic information.