Re: State-machine based syntax highlighting

[Robert Thorpe]

spamfilteraccount@gmail.com wrote:
> Robert Thorpe wrote:
> >
> > The Emacs "Semantic" package already does much of this, so do some
> > other editors.
>
> It would make more sense to create one such parser than reimplementing
> parsing in every editor...

In many ways it would.  But I expect it will be reimplemented in every
editor, for several reasons:-
* The insides of different editors work very differently
* External dependencies make building harder and irritate people
* Elisp is considerably nicer than many programming languages
reimplementing is not so hard
* Many people will make parsers as closed-source, or refuse to assign
copyright to the FSF
* People don't like helping other editors so they don't offer
functionality in an easily usable form
* GNU will not want to offer _parsers_ in an easily usable form,
because doing so would allow proprietery compilers to be built very
easily.

I'm not saying this is necessarily the best way, but I expect it's what
will happen.

> I did a quick search and found this page
>
>
> http://harmonia.cs.berkeley.edu/harmonia/projects/harmonia-mode/doc/index.html
>
> with a demo xemacs package with syntax highlighting and stuff. Looked
> interesting.

Interesting.