From: Florian Gross <flgr@...>
Date: 2005-03-24T22:24:53+09:00
Subject: Re: [ANN] Syntax 0.7.0

Jamis Buck wrote:

> Syntax is a pure-Ruby framework for doing lexical analysis (and, in 
> particular, syntax highlighting) of text. It currently sports lexers for 
> Ruby, XML, and YAML, and an HTML convertor (for colorizing texts in 
> those languages to HTML).

And is indeed a wonderful Ruby library. It's just so very cool to have a 
library that marks up Ruby properly with <span> classes. It allows you 
to do quite a lot to Ruby code.

Thanks a lot, Jamis, for this very nice library!

> For a pretty example (mkmf.rb fully syntax highlighted) see 
> http://ruby.jamisbuck.org/mkmf.html.

Another one (lots of new CSS) can be seen here:

http://flgr.0x42.net/highlighting.png

I'll be using the Syntax library for dissecting the submissions of the 
IORCC and it is a wonderful help.

If you're recognizing your own code in the above screenshot then let me 
tell you that you IMHO did a very nice job with your obfuscation.

> The next release will include robustness fixes for the XML and YAML 
> lexers, as well as a lexer for C. Lexers for Perl, Python, Java, HTML, 
> and RHTML would be nice as well, if I can get to them. Community 
> submissions will be gladly accepted, as long as you are okay with your 
> contributed code being distributed under the BSD license.

Having a C lexer will be wonderful as that is exactly something that I'm 
currently finding myself needing as well.

I think I'll be able to submit lexers for a few simple languages -- 
Befunge would be an easy one. But your framework seems to make lexing 
more complex language easy as well, so I might as well try that. Guess 
we'll see. :)