Improve Chapel highlight tools

[ben-albrecht]

Below is a list of syntax highlighters Chapel supports or aims to support. Many live in the repository under chapel/highlight/.

Highlighters

Supported

• pygments
  • used in documentation via sphinx
• tmlanguage
  • used by GitHub via linguist
• highlight.js
  • Stack Overflow uses highlight.js but not yet the Chapel highlighter. However the above is used in the Chapel discourse.
• sublimetext
• atom
• vim
• emacs
• tex
• GNU source-highlight
• highlight
• codemirror

In Progress

• Crucible (Syntax highlighting for Crucible #13200)
• Google Prettify (Add Chapel support to Google prettify #6501)
• TextMateBundler (Feature request: Visual Studio support #11842)
  • amounts to using the existing tmlanguage support noted above

Requested

Improvements

• [good first issue]: Document and/or fix any errors in our current syntax files
  • This is a great way for new contributors to get started contributing to the project, e.g. (Incorrect Syntax Highlighting For Escaped Character '\"' #6899)
• Test our maintained syntax files against the compiler and/or against each other
• Find ways to minimize maintenance overhead / rely on fewer syntax highlighters
  • e.g. we could remove our tex syntax highlighting and use the minted package, which relies on pygments, for highlighting in LaTeX
• Document and employ stricter policies for syntax changes
  • e.g. If adding a new keyword, update all highlight files

[ben-albrecht]

Inspired by #5900

Note that this isn't a super high priority -- it hasn't been a huge time sink for the core developers so far largely because we've let our syntax files get updated organically as users and developers discover bugs. Also, the evolution of the language syntax is fairly slow and will continue to slow down as the language matures, so this should become less of an issue as time moves forward.

[lydia-duncan]

Don't forget this and this!

[ben-albrecht]

I'm marking this [easy], for the general task of reporting/fixing errors in our current syntax files.

[parthsarthiprasad]

I know there has been considerable improvement in the field but plugin has some bugs I suppose in differentiation in string delimiters ?

[ben-albrecht]

@parthsarthiprasad - which editor (and if you know, highlighter) are you using?

[parthsarthiprasad]

@parthsarthiprasad - which editor (and if you know, highlighter) are you using?

It's VSCode and using tmbundle using tmlanguage

[parthsarthiprasad]

Since I have absolutely 0 information about this , but guessing , adding a similar block with string.quoted.single will be the solution for this right ? With few other changes.

[ben-albrecht]

Unfortunately, I don't have enough experience with tmbundle to make any specific suggestions myself. I would suggest trying it out and opening a PR if you are able to find a fix.

[redhatturtle]

It would be nice to have support for GtkSourceView that's used by Meld (diff/merge tool) and presumably by some other programs.