Check Your Work

If you do have the technique program installed, we can use it to check our work.

Check syntax is correct

Put the greeting : procedure from the previous page into a file called Hello.tq so we can run the compiler on it.

First you can run the check command to make sure it parses correctly:

$ technique check Hello.tq
ok
$

Code formatting

The Technique parser is remarkably whitespace agnostic. We ignore leading and trailing whitespace as much as possible. But there IS a code formatter, which will tidy your document to the canonical layout that will best represents the nesting of the code and your intent as the author.

$ technique format Hello.tq
greeting :

    1.  Attempt to say hello to everyone in the room and totally fail to get
        on with any of them.
    2.  Offer to make tea.
$

This will format the document and syntax highlight the output in your terminal console.

You may not have noticed, but it re-wrapped the content of step 1 to the width of a standard terminal and with the correct hanging indent. There's an option to specify a different wrap width if you require.

If you redirect to a file then it'll be plain unhighlighted text:

$ technique format Hello.tq > out
$ cat out
greeting :

    1.  Attempt to say hello to everyone in the room and totally fail to get
        on with any of them.
    2.  Offer to make tea.
$

In editors with support for the Technique language you can code format the document in-place with "Format Buffer" or similar.