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Completely unfair comparison of JavaScript syntax highlighters

softwaremaniacs.org

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Re: Completely unfair comparison of JavaScript syntax highlighters

#5
I hate Javascript syntax highlighting. I have never seen a library that doesn't degrade horribly in cases like naming a variable x' ("x prime") in Haskell (or when merely quoting a symbol in Lisp). They also tend not to support Perl at all, and definitely don't highlight q{Foo} as a string.

My advice is to use Emacs or Vim to do your syntax highlighting. They highlight well enough to please people actually doing work, and when people get annoyed with the rules, they fix them.

http://search.cpan.org/~geoffr/Text-VimColor-0.11/lib/Text/V...

http://search.cpan.org/~jrockway/Text-EmacsColor-0.03/lib/Te...

Re: Completely unfair comparison of JavaScript syntax highlighters

#6
post #5

I hate Javascript syntax highlighting. I have never seen a library that doesn't degrade horribly in cases like naming a variable x' ("x prime") in Haskell (or when merely quoting a symbol in Lisp). They also tend not to support Perl at all, and definitely don't highlight q{Foo} as a string. My advice is to use Emacs or Vim to do your syntax highlighting. They highlight well enough to please people actually doing work…

Highlight.js does support Perl, does mark up q{...} as strings and has no problem with quoting in Lisp. I'm not sure about Haskell thing you mention because Haskell is a new contribution. But I'm sure it's fixable if it doesn't do the right thing.

You're probably talking about a hoard of simplistic regexp parsers. Highlight.js is not one of them, it's a proper context-aware parser.