[Haskell-cafe] RE: highlighting-kate - syntax highlighting library

[mgsloan]

Awesome!  It looks quite nice, though it takes ages to compile.

Would this be suitable for a text editor? One issue with text editors
is you don't want to reprocess the entire file for each highlight.
This, combined with multi-line syntactic elements, such as multiline
strings or comments, makes for a rather awkward combination.  It
becomes a bit harder to predict the scope, highlighting wise, of
editing actions.  It may not really be necessary to do this very well.
 I for one find it annoying when you introduce an opening/closing
symbol, it freezes for an instant, and the highlighting of the rest of
the document alternates...  So perhaps it could check if you're
introducting a multiline element at the end when navigating off,
re-evaluate highlighting of the rest of the document.

Regardless of if the library can handle the requirements of
text-editing in its current state, it looks like it wouldn't be too
hard to add.  Most of the work has been done :)

Thanks!
-Michael Sloan
http://mgsloan.nfshost.com

> Hello all,
>
> I've been working on a source code syntax highlighting library. It is
> now somewhat usable, and help would be welcome in testing it further, so
> I'm making it publicly available:
>
>     darcs get http://johnmacfarlane.net/repos/highlighting-kate
>
> Currently, the following languages are supported:
>
> Ada        Asp              Awk            Bash             Bibtex
> C          Cmake            Coldfusion     Commonlisp       Cpp
> Css        D                Diff           Djangotemplate   Doxygen
> Dtd        Erlang           Fortran        Haskell          Html
> Java       Javadoc          Javascript     Json             Latex
> Lex        LiterateHaskell  Lua            Makefile         Matlab
> Mediawiki  Nasm             Objectivec     Objectivecpp     Ocaml
> Pascal     Perl             Php            Postscript       Prolog
> Python     Ruby             Scala          Scheme           Sgml
> Sql        SqlMysql         SqlPostgresql  Tcl              Texinfo
> Xml        Xslt             Yacc
>
> The parsers for individual languages are automatically generated
> from Kate syntax definitions.  The xml files have been included
> in the repository, together with the program that converts them to
> Haskell modules.  There's also a standalone program, Highlight, that
> you can use to test the highlighting. (See README for instructions.)
>
> Bug reports and patches are welcome.  Note that I don't want to make
> any manual modifications to the generated modules in
> Text/Highlighting/Kate/Syntax. Changes should be made either in the
> source xml files or in the program ParseSyntaxFiles.hs that generates
> these modules.
>
> John