On 2016-01-16 16:13, H. S. Teoh via Digitalmars-d wrote:
I disagree. I think having the dmd itself (lexer, parser, etc.) as a library (with the dmd executable merely being the default frontend) will do D a lot of good. For one thing, IDE's will no longer need to reinvent a D parser for the purposes of syntax highlighting; they can reuse the actual parser the compiler itself uses, and thus actually be correct (whereas their own parser may actually only parse a subset of D correctly). They will also be able to support instant feedback as the user types in D code (highlight syntax errors on the fly, etc.).
I agree very much with this. Unfortunately many (most?) editors use their own weird syntax to describe grammars for syntax highlighting and cannot use a proper lexer/parser.
-- /Jacob Carlborg
