On 2007-12-13, Dotan Cohen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On 13/12/2007, Tim Chase <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> >> Oof! Fond as I am of promoting pyparsing, writing a Pascal >> >> compiler (or even just syntax checker) is not a job I would >> >> tackle lightly, much less suggest to a new Python developer. >> >> True enough...thus my weeks/months/years estimate for such an >> undertaking :) >> >> But if not mentioned, you know the next question would be "how do >> I create a regular expression to match valid Pascal programs?" >> > > Go track down the source code of an open source text editor > that supports Pascal highlighting. Kate comes to mind. It's not > written in Python, but it will have Pascal parsing code for the > highlighter.
A syntax highlighter usually knows very little about the syntax of a language. Mostly, it just finds keywords and highlights them. The improvements beyond that will generally be haphazard, e.g., the Vim syntax highlighting code for Python knows basically what a function header looks like so it can highlight the function name. It also (doesn't really) know how to figure out what's a string and what isn't. The auto-indenter is often smarter about syntax, but knows just a small subset of syntax rules, enought to do proper indenting. For some languages, e.g., Python, that's a fairly small subset. For others, it's cumbersomely large and Vim's support is cruddy. -- Neil Cerutti -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
