From: Sam Roberts <sroberts@...>
Date: 2005-03-24T23:44:16+09:00
Subject: Re: [ANN] Syntax 0.7.0

Quoting jamis@37signals.com, on Thu, Mar 24, 2005 at 02:54:20PM +0900:
> 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).

Would this be an appropriate tool for parsing ruby to generate ctags?

To write a tags file I need to know where I am in ruby's terms (in what
class, module), what was found (method, attribute, constant, class,
...), AND I need to generate a regex that will find this place in the
file. For repeated names this can mean knowing what the entire line
looks like, so that I can put leading whitespace into the regex.

Is Syntax something I should be looking at?  It seems there are some
similarities.. if you know enough to hilight, maybe you know enough to
generate a ctag?

I'm using rdoc right now, but it is a very large tool, and I would like
something smaller and more malleable, if possible.

Thanks,
Sam

> Links:
> 
>   Download: http://rubyforge.org/frs/?group_id=505
>   User Manual: http://docs.jamisbuck.org/read/book/4
> 
> This release is much improved in accuracy and robustness (at least, for 
> the Ruby lexer--the XML and YAML lexers were not changed). The Ruby 
> lexer now deals better with many ambiguous cases, and even supports 
> multiple heredocs on a single line. It accurately colorizes cgi.rb and 
> mkmf.rb from the standard lib, if that means anything at all to you.
> 
> The Syntax framework also supports "regions" now (thanks to flgr for 
> the suggestion) and sports many bug fixes (thanks to Carl Drinkwater 
> for discovering most of them). Syntax regions just allow one group to 
> span (and include) multiple groups--like a string that includes 
> interpolated expressions and escape sequences.
> 
> For a pretty example (mkmf.rb fully syntax highlighted) see 
> http://ruby.jamisbuck.org/mkmf.html.
> 
> 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.
> 
> Enjoy!
> 
> - Jamis
> 
>