Code style and indentations about zeffiro_interface HOT 7 CLOSED

I would propose not to just fix certain files of the project manually and hope that the repository will stay clean and well organized on its own, but introduce a dedicated GitHub CI action with some Matlab linter. It would block all pull requests that do not satisfy the agreed code style.

There are several linters and static code analysis tools available for MATLAB that you can use for GitHub CI (Continuous Integration) to ensure code quality and enforce best practices. Here are a few popular options:

• MATLAB Code Analyzer (M-Lint): MATLAB itself provides a built-in code analysis tool called M-Lint. It helps identify potential issues and provides suggestions to improve code quality. You can run M-Lint from the MATLAB command window or integrate it into your CI workflow using the MATLAB command-line interface.
  Link: https://blogs.mathworks.com/community/2008/09/08/let-m-lint-help-simplify-your-code/

• miss_hit: MATLAB Independent, Small & Safe, High Integrity Tools - code formatter, Style Checker, Bug finding etc
  GitHub repository: https://github.com/florianschanda/miss_hit

These tools can be integrated into your GitHub CI workflow by adding the necessary commands and configurations to your CI pipeline configuration file (e.g., .github/workflows/main.yml).

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* MATLAB Code Analyzer (M-Lint): MATLAB itself provides a built-in code analysis tool called M-Lint. It helps identify potential issues and provides suggestions to improve code quality. You can run M-Lint from the MATLAB command window or integrate it into your CI workflow using the MATLAB command-line interface.
  Link: https://blogs.mathworks.com/community/2008/09/08/let-m-lint-help-simplify-your-code/

There is actually a newer linter provided by MathWorks, that has superseded mlint, called checkcode. I've been using it to check files when not using the Matlab editor, while writing code. We should probably use that in CI instead, if we choose to stick to built-in functionality.

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The pull request #218 will introduce a linting action, which will be run when things are pushed to the main_development_branch (although for testing purposes it is currently set to run when commits are pushed to the related feature branch). I might also add an action that will be run when a pull request is made towards master.

What is still missing is a comprehensive set of linter messages we wish to disallow. The list of possible values can be found at https://se.mathworks.com/help/matlab/matlab_env/index-of-code-analyzer-checks.html.

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There is one concern, though: we would need to be sponsored by MathWorks to use the Matlab Actions they provide:

Sponsored License -- for use in support of a program or activity sponsored by MathWorks. Not for government, commercial or other non-sponsored organizational use.

@sampsapursiainen Are we considered to be sponsored by MathWorks?

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Starting from R2022b, Matlab also provides the codeIssues function, which provides more thorough information than mlint and checkcode. Most importantly, it provides information related to issue severity, in the form of matlab.codeanalysis.IssueSeverity.{info, warning, error} enumeration, per each issue discovered. The linter now uses that by default, but can also call mlint and checkcode if needed.

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I wrote a little web scraper (link), that allowed me to generate a CSV of Matlab's linter messages and their severities. The file could be loaded as a Matlab table, which could be used with mlint and checkcode to block messages with a severity of error, as long as the CSV was loaded into the repo, preferrably into the +utilities/ folder.

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Looks like the related pull request was merged. The linter message file mentioned above was not yet added, but since most of the linter messages seem to be related to the use of eval, which was already in the list of unwanted warnings, I think we can close this.

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