Re: Now, to try again...

On Mon, Dec 18, 2000 at 11:30:09AM +0000, David Grove wrote:
> 
> Bart Lateur <[email protected]> wrote:

>  > But, the gist of this post is: we don't want to loose the usefulness of
>  > the syntax highlighter, as soon as there is one syntax error in the
>  > script, because this will be the normal situation while editing source.
>  > Parsers are generally very bad at parsing erroneous code.
> 
> You're forgetting something. Any such editor would have to be written
> either in Perl, or in C with builtin Perl, in order to gain access to this
> type of parser feedback. That or we'd have to communicate with perl

When I made the suggestion to give the perl parser enough API to let
an editor use it for syntax highlighting, I was thinking of an editor
written in C with embedded perl. Such as emacs or vi.

I didn't say that anyone should actually do it :-)
[or that it wouldn't be usably fast on anything expensive enough to come
with less than 1Gb RAM as standard]
Just that it would be nice if the parser API were flexible enough to make
it possible (if not easy) for someone to do it.
As it seemed to be a bit of parser API we'd not yet considered.
And this is the parser-api list, so it seemed very on topic.

I think I'm not wrong in saying that making the parser state totally
encapsulated makes the parser restartable and goes a long way to making
it re-entrant.

Nicholas Clark