A C source code style checker..

This style marker should enforce the rules outlayed in the 'csse2310-style-guide.pdf' which was created for the computer science course 'CSSE2310' at the University of Queensland.

If/when this project becomes more reliable than the previous implementations of the automarker then the tutors of this course will swap over to using 'simpatico' for their marking.

Also, many hours of marking time is quite expensive for such a menial task, and this project could save money as well as time and effort.

Currently a C++ program called 'vera++' tokenises the C source code input and feeds it to a very large tcl script which generates the errors.

This script has many issues and is terribly hard to modify. One of the major problems with the current script is that it generates a large number of style errors for validly styled C code.

After the automarker is complete the course tutors must go through the generated errors extremely carefully to validate the process. Very frequently the tutors make mistakes.

Each style error must be declared in the format: filename:lineNumber: [CATEGORY] Description

The categories are roughly described below. More details are given in rules.md and in csse2310-style-guide.pdf.

• variables
• defines
• functions
• typedefs

• space before brace
• correct placement
• correct alignment

• multiples of four spaces
• nesting correctly indented
• line continuation

• grammatical spacing around assignment operators
• correctly spaced vertically

• globals
• functions (parameters esp.)
• lengthy or tricky code

• no function over 50 lines
• modularity / no excessive duplication of code

• all lines must be shorter than 80 chars long (including \r)

./simpatico.py file1.c file2.c