MATLAB Independent, Small & Safe, High Integrity Tools

MATLAB is a popular programming language in many engineering disciplines, intended for the fast development of prototypes. But as we all know, prototypes make it into production all the time, so now you're stuck. Unfortunately, there are no style checkers or "good" static analysis tools for MATLAB. This project attempts to fill this gap.

If you have MATLAB in your production code and want to improve code quality then this tool-suite is for you.

Tools & Documentation

All tools and language features are documented here: https://florianschanda.github.io/miss_hit/

We intend to provide more tools later, please refer to the roadmap for more information.

Please refer to the release notes for a summary of recent changes and known issues.

• Style Checker mh_style.py

  A simple coding style checker and code formatter for MATLAB or Octave code. See https://florianschanda.github.io/miss_hit/style_checker.html for more information and a user manual.

• Code Metrics mh_metric.py

  A simple code metric tool for MATLAB or Octave code. See https://florianschanda.github.io/miss_hit/metrics.html for more information and a user manual.

• Pragmas understood by MISS_HIT tools

  The tools can be controlled with some special pragmas. See https://florianschanda.github.io/miss_hit/pragmas.html for more information.

Installing and using MISS_HIT

Just check out the repository and put it on your path. That's it. MISS_HIT does not require any python packages or libraries.

To use MISS_HIT you just give it a set of files to process.

$ mh_style.py my_file.m

Configuration is described in the user manual(s).

The version of Python I am using is 3.6.9 but any earlier or later version should also work. I am not using any overly fancy language features.

If you want to help develop, you will also need Pylint (at least version 2.4.2).

Challenges

There are serious issues present in the MATLAB and Octave languages on all levels (lexical structure, parsing, and semantics) that make it very difficult to create any tool processing them. In fact github is littered with incomplete attempts and buggy parsers. The usual question is "but what about Octave?"; it is a similar language, but it is not compatible with MATLAB. If your problem is parsing MATLAB then the Octave parser will not help you. Even very simple statements such as x = [1++2] mean different things (3 in MATLAB, syntax error in Octave).

We've documented the key issues we've faced and how we've resolved them.

Copyright

MISS_HIT is licensed under the GNU GPL version 3 as described in LICENSE.

The vast majority of this work is (C) Florian Schanda. Contributions from the following people and entities are under their copyright, with the same license:

• Zenuity AB
• Alina Boboc

Copyright of octave tests

This project includes modified/adapted parts of the GNU Octave testsuite under tests/parser/octave_*. These are (c) their original authors. Each file there describes from which file they derive.

Note on parser tests

Some of the parser tests include code samples and documentation snippets from the publically available MathWorks website. An attribution (in comment form) is always included in these cases.

Note on the documentation assets

The documentation uses feather icons which are licensed under the MIT License.