Re: [Nano-devel] aggressive C color highlighting

[Alexey Toptygin]

On Wed, 2 Aug 2006, David Lawrence Ramsey wrote:

> > By letting earlier rules call 'dibs' on regions they've already
> > matched, we would emulate what the C lexer is doing: if a // comment
> > starts, the rest of the line is not processed in any way; if a /*
> > comment starts, no other processing will be done until the first */.
> > This lets us define complex syntaxes, and handle pathological cases
> > correctly: the same way that a C (or other) compiler would. In theory,
> > this could also save nano some effort, since no more tests will need
> > to be done once the first one matches and the regexes can be simpler.
>
> Interesting idea.  However, there are some cases where overlaps are
> needed.  How should a regex that allows overlaps be indicated?

What cases would require overlaps? Can you give an example? Presumably, 
every piece of text should only be one color, and match one regex.

> Also, there's still a problem with the feature freeze, as there doesn't 
> appear to be any way to implement this without a massive rewrite of the 
> color code in edit_draw().

That's true, but I think a rewrite will be necessary to get fully featured 
highlighting. I don't have time now, but I'd be glad to look at it once 
the freeze ends (presumably in a few months?).

                        Alexey