This is a Factor port of the jEdit 4.3 syntax highlighting engine
(http://www.jedit.org).
jEdit 1.2, released in late 1998, was the first release to support
syntax highlighting. It featured a small number of hand-coded
"token markers" -- simple incremental parers -- all based on the
original JavaTokenMarker contributed by Tal Davidson.
Around the time of jEdit 1.5 in 1999, Mike Dillon began developing a
jEdit plugin named "XMode". This plugin implemented a generic,
rule-driven token marker which read mode descriptions from XML files.
XMode eventually matured to the point where it could replace the
formerly hand-coded token markers.
With the release of jEdit 2.4, I merged XMode into the core and
eliminated the old hand-coded token markers.
XMode suffers from a somewhat archaic design, and was written at a time
when Java VMs with JIT compilers were relatively uncommon, object
allocation was expensive, and heap space tight. As a result the parser
design is less general than it could be.
Furthermore, the parser has a few bugs which some mode files have come
to depend on:
- If a RULES tag does not define any keywords or rules, then its
NO_WORD_SEP attribute is ignored.
The Factor implementation duplicates this behavior.
- if a RULES tag does not have a NO_WORD_SEP attribute, then
it inherits the value of the NO_WORD_SEP attribute from the previous
RULES tag.
The Factor implementation does not duplicate this behavior. If you
find a mode file which depends on this flaw, please fix it and submit
the changes to the jEdit project.
- References to non-existent rule sets in IMPORT tags and DELEGATE
attributes were ignored in jEdit. They raise an error in Factor.
If you wish to contribute a new or improved mode file, please contact
the jEdit project. Updated mode files in jEdit will be periodically
imported into the Factor source tree.
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