Re: Strip SIG on reply
On Fri, 12 Dec 2003, David Yitzchak Cohen wrote:
> The only authoritative source for answers to "what's this thing?" is
> the compiler itself. Since only the tokenizer, preprocessor, and a
sure. however not all language interpreters give useful diagnostics.
Trivial things like an unbalanced delimiter are easier to spot when
it's highlighted.
> tiny bit of logic are needed to properly classify _everything_, the
> compiler doesn't have to do a whole lot before producing the XML document.
> I'd much rather have syntax highlighting that's always guaranteed to be
> correct or none at all; this take-me-with-a-grain-of-salt highlighting I
> find more annoyance than use, and any scheme that's capable of failing
> will always fail exactly when you need it to work right, as the sage
> Murphy pointed out ages ago.
It would be nice if all of the computer languages were consistent and
well-defined, but that's not the case. A highlighter will usually be
a parallel implementation, for the obvious reasons, with the usual
drawbacks.
--
Thomas E. Dickey
http://invisible-island.net
ftp://invisible-island.net