Natural Language Server (NatLS)
NatLS is a language server implementation for the Natural language created by Software AG.
It aims to provide useful features to drive daily development in Natural and provide a modern approach for development tools for Natural.
A VS Code extension is available to use the language server in Visual Studio Code. This extension serves as a reference client implementation and is already used for daily Natural development.
The latest release of tools are available on GitHub Releases.
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Static code analysis with NatLint
NatLS includes a static code analysis tool called NatLint, which can also be used standalone without the language server.
It features analysis rules that help to find potential bugs and code smells in Natural code. Rules can span different statement types to find potential issues that are hard to find by hand.
As an example, in the following code snippet a file path is constructed using COMPRESS and then used in a DEFINE WORK FILE statement.
COMPRESS '$HOME/folder/' #FILENAME INTO #FILEPATH
DEFINE WORK FILE 1 #FILEPATHNatLint recognizes that #FILEPATH is compressed without LEAVING NO so that the resulting file path will have spaces in it. NL015 will catch this and report it, even when those two statements are far apart in the code.