LabMate

LabMate is your friendly robotic assistant for writing meaningful Matlab code.

Installation

You will need to have the GHC Haskell compiler and the cabal tool on your system. To install, clone the repository, and execute

cabal install --overwrite-policy=always

This should give you a labmate executable to run.

Usage

LabMate is meant to work as a transducer: it converts an input file into a possibly more informal output file. If the input file contains directives (encoded as formally marked Matlab comments), the output file will contain additional responses, either in the form of Matlab comments again, or in the form of generated Matlab code.

LabMate as a filter: If LabMate is given no argument, it reads from the standard input stream and writes to the standard output stream. Thus LabMate can be invoked as follows:

cat infile.m | labmate

This functionality is useful for running LabMate as a "filter" in your favourite text editor; see instructions for setting up an Emacs mode that does this below.

LabMate acting on a given file: If LabMate is given a filename as an argument, it will read from the given file, and output an updated version of the file to standard output. Thus LabMate can also be invoked as follows:

labmate infile.m > outfile.m

LabMate acting on a given directory: If LabMate is given a directory name as input, it will try to parse all the Matlab files in that directory, and report how well it succeeded. It will not actually transduce the contents of the files. This mode can be useful for verifying that LabMate at least understands the syntactic structure of an existing codebase.

labmate examples/

Other command line options

LabMate also understands the following command line options:

Option	Action
--help	Print help text, then exit
--verbose	Print internal state of LabMate after execution
--no-version	Do not insert LabMate version number in output

Emacs mode

The file labmate.el can be used to add basic LabMate transducer functionality to the text editor Emacs. Add the following to your .emacs file to enable it (where PATH is the path to wherever you have stored labmate.el):

(autoload 'labmate-mode "PATH/labmate.el" nil t)
(add-to-list 'auto-mode-alist '("\\.m\\'" . labmate-mode))

After doing so, opening a file with extension .m should automatically start LabMate mode, which will give you syntax highlighting of directives and responses. More importantly, you can run LabMate on the current buffer by pressing C-c C-l (Control-c followed by Control-l).