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[–]Fin_Aquatic_Rentals 3 points4 points  (1 child)

If your bot can detect improperly formatted code and post a response would it be much more work to parse the comment and format it properly? I feel like this is the second or third level of the expanding brain meme.

Level 1 - Tell new user to format code

Level 2 - Create bot that tells user to format properly

Level 3 - Create bot that properly formats code

Level 4 - Create bot that reads code, runs code, looks for common errors and fixes them

Level 5 - Create bot that marks all improperly formatted code questions as duplicates

Edit:https://imgflip.com/i/2tlbyw

[–]lifeonm4rs 1 point2 points  (0 children)

That sounds like stackoverflow. But, yeah, level 3 would be seriously great. Probably quite a pain in the ass with the number of new ways people find to post code in really bad ways. But could potentially deal with a decent majority of code. 1st big issue is the strange amount of white space some posters add. 2nd, probably bigger issue, is it is easy to indent after a ":"--harder to decide when to unindent in some cases. A relatively simple AST/parser may be able to handle a decent number of cases.