✧✦Catherine✦✧21h ago

i'm at a loss of words after reading a paper about reformatting code using an ML model that has a measured statistical quantity A_c which says how often the reformatted code behaves the same as the original

the "ideal" (their choice of words) case is 64.2%

edit: this got popular without me really intending to, so here's why i'm reading research: i want a semantic style transfer tool that can automatically format a patch "the same as the rest of the file / rest of codebase is formatted" without the rigidity involved in black or rustfmt that i find so hostile to my workflow that i refuse to use them. obviously, i want a tool that generates semantically equivalent code 100.0% of time (ignoring source locations or reading from __file__)

Show thread✧✦Catherine✦✧21h ago
this isn't satire, this is real research published by IEEE/ACM
Show threadDeborah Preuss, pcc 🇨🇦21h ago

@whitequark @danlyke so … by "reformatted" I assume you mean aesthetically tidied up, with no change in functionality required?

If I got that right: wtf?

Show threadJohn

@deborahh @whitequark @danlyke

No.

"there is no existing work that performs full stylization on an arbitrary piece of code. The most common methods are rule-based linters, formatters, which are limited to a few pre-defined style rules"

6:38amMastodon for Android
Show thread✧✦Catherine✦✧14h ago
@mrkeen @deborahh @danlyke I do think that stretching the definition of what "code style" could reasonably refer to until it fits the shape of the research product is a part of the problem here. (Consider that the introduction explicitly refers to the gotofail bug as something the research is supposed to help with, whereas it is plainly evident that it would make that problem only worse.)