Re: [gedit-list] GtkSourceView

[Sébastien Wilmet <swilmet gnome org>]

On Wed, Jun 08, 2016 at 09:05:39AM +0200, Stefan Salewski wrote:
> Another minor problem:
>
> Nim has, as Haskell and Python, indent based syntax. For example we
> have a type section
>
> type
>   Name: string
>   Color: int
>   
> or
>
> while i >= 0:
>   sum = sum + i
>   inc(i)
>
> Blocks/sections end when indendt decreases again, so there is no end or
> } marker. The problem is, that most people use 2 spaces for an indent
> step, but some may use only one or maybe 3. It would be nice if the
> syntax highlighting knows the correct user desired indent size, so
> maybe when 2 spaces are the desired step size, it can display the line
> in red when indent step is odd. Related is a visible indent help -- I
> used two spaces width bars left to the indent area which helps the eye
> to see block termination. All that works fine for fixed index size.
>
> Do you have an idea how it may also work for user defined indent sizes?
>
> It would be easy when single tabs would be used for indentation -- I
> myself would prefer tabs, but majority of users and Nim developers do
> not.

I would suggest not implementing this in the *.lang file. A *.lang file
is not a magical solution where you can implement all sort of features
that need a parser. Normally the syntax requires just a scanner (i.e.
tokenizer), but with GtkSourceView it's more powerful since you can have
nested contexts (so it's between a scanner and parser, it's not as
powerful as a real parser implemented in a compiler).

--
Sébastien