Week 2 29th Oct (Inception Report)

Questions

• Check inception report? + Second Marker
• How much research should I be doing? (Literature survey)
  • FSharpLint indepth workings?
  • Ionide indepth workings?
  • Others, e.g. Hlint/Credo?

Inception report

Aims & background material

The aim of the project: Implement more sophisticated stylistic and error hints for F# targeted at new programmers.

Examples include:

• unbalanced opening bracket is currently not detected
• identify complex expressions and suggest simplification
• replace anonymous functions used in complex expression by using a sub-function instead

The ultimate goal would be to incorporate this project into Ionide, which is a widely used plugin for Intellisense and other features for F#.

Background research

There is currently a project with similar goals called FSharpLint. FSharpLint currently sits within Ionide and provides stylistic hints. The full number of analysers/features supported are listed below:

Student Summary of project deliverables, fallbacks & extensions

The project deliverables can be broadly broken into three parts:

• FSharp learning
• Heuristics Research
• Implementation

FSharp Learning

To improve functional language skills (as someone with only basic experience) a core personal objective is to learn FSharp and gain knowledge in how a functional language differs from a procedural one.

Functional programming exists within several procedural languages such as Javascript and Lambdas in modern C++.

Summary of Risks