Stylist is a code style checking tool built on a framework which supports multiple styles across multiple languages.
But aren't there many code style checking tools out there, why create a new one?
The simple reason is that few of them support Fortran, a language still in widespread use in the scientific computing domain. They can also tend towards the zealous when enforcing the "one true style" whereas long running science models tend to diverge quite radically in what they like, style-wise.
Large models also tend to be implemented using more than one language so a tool which is capable of understanding all of them would be welcomed by science developers.
Thus a tool was developed based on a framework which hopes to support ready extension and reconfiguration.
The project is still in its infancy so only a few rules have been implemented and only for Fortran. Stubs are provided to show how it might be extended to support C.
Find the project at https://github.com/MetOffice/stylist
Installation can be as simple as pip install stylist or
conda install -c conda-forge stylist.
As always it is also possible to install from the project source by running
python setup.py. The source may be obtained by downloading a tarball or by
cloning the repository.
Stylist provides a command-line tool stylist for normal use. It can also be
used as a package if you want to integrate it with another tool. Documentation
regarding this second option is maintained in the project wiki.
The command-line tool is not complicated to use:
stylist [-help] [-verbose] [-map-extension EXTENSION:LANGUAGE[:PREPROCESSOR:...]] FILE ...
The only required arguments are one or more filenames. These are the files which will be checked. If a directory is specified then the tool will automatically descend into it checking all files which it recognises by extension.
If you wish to make the tool aware of new extensions then use the
-map-extension argument. It takes a colon separated list. The first item
is the plain extension (no preceding full-stop). After that comes the
language to understand the file as. Finally a list of zero or more
preprocessors to apply to the file before parsing.
For example: stylist -map-extension spesh:fortran:fpp:pfp
The keys for selecting language and preprocessor are found in __main__.py.
If you want a running commentary of what the tool is doing then use the
-verbose argument.