What is MISS_HIT?

MISS_HIT is several things, but most importantly it is a set of tools that will make your code better (and hopefully your life easier) if you are writing programs using the MATLAB, Simulink, or Octave programming languages. To be honest, I wrote MISS_HIT out of frustration, in that there is a huge MATLAB eco-system in industry, and the code quality is generally poor as there is little to no tool-support that is taken for granted in any other programming language. So MISS_HIT attempts to fill the gaps with the following tools:

MH Style - A configurable style checker and code formatter (sometimes also called code beautifier or pretty printer). It can take any MATLAB or Octave code and fix e.g. indentation and other style problems.
MH Metrics - A code metrics tool, that can produce a variety of complexity metrics for your code. It includes a justification mechanism so that you can use this tool in CI, and HTML reports.
MH Lint - A bug-finding static analysis tool, that can detect some questionable, ambiguous, or misleading constructs in your code.
MH Trace - simple tool to extrace tags from source and tests to help demonstrate requirements traceability.
MH Copyright - A tool that can simplify maintaining and updating copyright notices and docstrings in your code.

Please note that all these tools also support updating MATLAB code embedded inside Simulink models.

Example

The style checker can turn code like this: function rv= foo (x), if x < 0,,rv=- x;else,rv=x;,; end; Into something more readable:

function rv = foo (x)
    if x < 0
        rv = -x;
    else
        rv = x;
    end

Quick start

The easiest way to install it is to use the latest release published on PyPI:

$ pip3 install miss_hit

Then, you can style-check your program, by simply using:

$ mh_style --fix my_program.m

Please refer to the online documentation on GitHub for more details.

What makes MISS_HIT good?

There have been other attempts at this, but MISS_HIT tries to do things differently (and I hope better). Specifically:

It is completely stand-alone. It does not require a working MATLAB or Octave setup.
It is not just a bag of reg-ex, or a wrapper arounds some undocumented MATLAB internals. It is based on a feature complete lexer and parser, which supports every single weird feature of the MATLAB language.
It contains features specifically for huge industrial code-bases (i.e. millions of lines): multi-threaded analysis and a sophisticated configuration and justification mechanism.
Designed for both interactive use during development, and integration into modern CI environments.