> The most unusual part of the language is that it's a declarative language > with an implicit input-loop. Sometimes novice programmers take to those > kinds of languages faster than the more traditional imperative part. Of > course I then spoiled things by exposing the raw Perl regex language, > which seems to scare those same novices away. > > I'm not familiar with Programmer's Notepad. I looked at HomeSite's, and > found it hard to get my head around it. Using Scite properties didn't look > to scale up. I was impressed by TextMate's language, but didn't see how I > could use it to implement features like here-documents or arbitrary string > delimiters (Perl).
Yes I've been looking at TextMate's features with some interest, it seems to be particularly popular at the moment with a number of efforts to clone its success on Windows (e.g. InType). I have a feeling that HomeSite may have been using the same system as the original Programmer's Notepad, a component called TSyntaxMemo for Delphi. I went for XML defined lexers for the new version of PN and they're very simplistic. They wouldn't cope at all with representing rhtml or anything like that. I have found the biggest problem for adoption is the availability of: 1. Tools to generate simple lexers (i.e. GUIs) 2. Examples of existing lexers Scintilla builds so many lexers in (and the number keeps growing) that example lexers built with a custom language are often replaced quickly with real code ones (faster, sometimes better featured) and so lose their purpose. It would be great to have a good enough lexer definition system that most of the built-in lexer code became un-necessary. Most of the ultra-successful editors have language support defined by their users in the form of scripts or lexer definitions. Simon. _______________________________________________ Scintilla-interest mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.lyra.org/mailman/listinfo/scintilla-interest
