As suggested by 200_success in a comment to this answer of mine, I'm asking this question. For me, missing tools are the biggest problem of this site. I'd bet that it repels potential reviewers and makes the remaining ones inefficient.
Obviously, we can't have everything a company using a limited set of languages and strict code conventions can offer, but the SO format is pretty lacking. But there are quite a few programmers here (all of us?) and something should be doable.
Colors
As a fundamental part of CR are code changes, there should be a way to distinguish
- old code to be removed
- code to be added
- code to be preserved
- additionally: comments belonging to the CR (rather then to the code)
Maybe a diff-style input like
/ Always use braces to avoid bugs.
- for(int i=1;i<5;++i) sum = sum + i;
+ for (int i = 1; i < 5; ++i) {
+ sum += i;
+ }
/ This gives us no information, just drop it.
- // Now we're done.
= return sum;
could be used for this and display an usual code block, but with let's say blue/red/green/black text. This would make the CR code even a bit harder to write but much easier to read.
Preview
As CRs tend to be much longer than typical SO answers, you can't see the formatted output without scrolling a lot. There should be a preview in another window.
Other features
There's a lot what could be done, but at least something should be done so that we can do more review and less wasting time.
