[Haskell-cafe] Editor

[Arthur van Leeuwen]

On 21-mei-2007, at 13:56, Michael T. Richter wrote:
>
> Hell, even comparing the out-of-the-box syntax highlighting support  
> in Gedit vs. (G)Vim is instructive.  Code like  
> "makeRandomValueST :: StdGen -> (MyType, StdGen)" (which,  
> incidentally, was far easier to copy from in Gedit than GVim to  
> paste into this message) only differentiates "::" and "->" from the  
> text and delimiters in GVim while in Gedit (keeping in mind that  
> Gedit isn't a very good editor!) differentiates those plus  
> "makeRandomValueST" vs. "StdGen" and "MyType".  And the parentheses.

This is an interesting take on things. What to highlight and why is
decidedly non-trivial. Personally, I strongly *dislike* highlighting
of user-defined identifiers. And honestly, in Haskell, most identifiers
are user-defined. Furthermore, the haskell vim highlighter actually
allows you to highlight delimiters, True and False, the names of a
number of types, and the names of debugging functions. It requires
settings to turn that on though, as the highlighter should be as  
minimally
visually intrusive in its default setting as possible. Or at least,  
that's what
I think, and I was the last person to get his grubby paws on vim's  
highlighter
for Haskell. It does highlight literate Haskell code quite nicely  
however,
both in bird track style and in TeX style. It does expect literate  
Haskell
to be in .lhs files though...

Note that it is somewhat tricky to distinguish between the occurences
of the a's before and after the semicolon in the following:
	map :: ( a -> b ) -> [a] -> [b]; map f (a:as) = f a : (map f as)

I'd like to see what GEdit does to that. :)

Doei, Arthur van Leeuwen.

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