On 2016-04-07 02:53, Walter Bright wrote:
I doubt any of them could lex C/C++ correctly (trigraphs, macros, backslash line splicing, wysiwyg string literals).
No. But it doesn't need to be perfect. There's also nothing that tells what's wrong and what's right. For example, in TextMate the identifier in a function declaration is syntax highlighted, but in Eclipse it's not syntax highlighted.
Are you talking about an AST? (Good luck doing an AST for C++ without a real C++ compiler front end! Not that hard for D, though.)
Yes. In TextMate one describes a grammar and assigns different scopes to the different rules. These scopes are then used by the theme engine to syntax highlight the code. The scopes are also used to enable/disable different bundle commands. For example, pressing Ctrl+B inside a comment could make the selected text bold (replace the text with an HTML or Markdown tag) while outside comments something else happens.
TextMate also adds top level declarations like classes, structs and functions to a jump-list, for easy navigation.
Note that I'm not defending the editors, I would love if one could use a proper front end to do the lexing and parsing. I'm just saying it's not as easy as it sounded in the post I originally replied to.
-- /Jacob Carlborg
