From: Neil Hodgson <nhodgson@...>
Date: 2002-09-08T06:52:00+09:00
Subject: Re: SciTE/VIM Syntax highlighting

Albert Wagner:
> I just spent the last six weeks trying to write an editor using the Ruby
lexer
> from irb to aid in syntax highlighting.  So at the moment, I am of the
> opinion that a proper lexer is probably not fast enough to be anything
more
> than an aggravation in syntax highlighting :-)

   Lexing generally requires very little state compared to parsing and so
can be done well incrementally. For an editor, most modifications only
change the contents of one line and you often only need to relex that line.
Longer lexemes like multi-line comments may require more effort but only
when the modification creates a comment start or end or removes a comment
start or end.

   Neil