From: Tim X Date: 2007-01-04T13:30:12+09:00 Subject: Re: Scriptable text editor with Ruby? "Simon Strandgaard" writes: > Subject: Re: Scriptable text editor with Ruby? > > On 1/3/07, Dolazy wrote: > [snip stuff about ruby/c++] >> Or maybe there is a more obvious and straightforward approach that I >> overlooked? > > have you considered writing the entire editor in ruby and > then use ruby qt.. so you don't use any c++? > > Ruby is good at string manipulation, so its possible > to do the entire syntax coloring in ruby. I think syntax highlighting can be non-trivial to get right, paticularly with larger files (see some of the debates in emacs and xemacs community as an example). What I think would be really good is semantic highlighting rather than syntax highlighting - this may sound crazy, but I find syntax problems to be the more trivial bugs to squash. Highlighting which gave more information on the "meaning" of what you are coding would probably provide more valuable information. The problem of course is that the editor wold then need to understand more than the basic syntax rules of the language you are coding in - essentially, it would need an interpreter, either built-in or closely integrated. I've not really given a lot of thought to this, it just strikes me that nearly every editor does syntax highlighting and maybe its time to re-evaluate the paradigm and see if, given faster cpus, greater memory and larger storage, it might not be time to look at doing things differently. Tim -- tcross (at) rapttech dot com dot au