New Syn(whatever)Syn Highlighter for SynEdit

[Edson]

Like someone of you must know, I been working these days on develop a fast and flexible highlighter for SynEdit. This is the result:

blog.pucp.edu.pe/media/4946/20130924-tsyngensyn.rar

It could be configured using an external syntax file, with something like this:

<Language name="php">
  <String Start="'" End="'"></String>
  <String Start="&quot;" End="&quot;" ></String>
  <Comment Start="//" ></Comment>
  <Comment Start="/*" End="*/" ></Comment>
  <Keywords>  fool bar other_fool other_bar
   </Keywords>
</Language>


It's still on development, but I think it could be useful.

[Edson]

Can a scriptable highlighter be faster than a hardcoded?
Of course, it depends on algorithm/implementation/source text.

After some depuration, here is this "scriptable-external-file-sintax-highlighter".
I have included a simple test of speed for a PHP syntax and the comparison with the native PHP lazarus highlighter.

[Morton]

Of course, it depends on algorithm/implementation/source text.

Algorithms and knowing how to implement are the most important prerequisites, aside of a good brain.
I never understood why most developers do not care.

[Edson]

I never understood why most developers do not care.

Calm down. If everybody was a good programmer, Programming wouldn't be a skill, it would be a human feature. So it would be boring.

Talking of highlighters, I want to clarify that I haven't defined identifiers and numbers in the syntax, because the default is:

<Identifiers
Start = “ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz$_”
Content = “ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0123456789_”>
</Identifiers>

<Number Start=”0123456789.” > </Number>

[Morton]

Calm down. If everybody was a good programmer, Programming wouldn't be a skill, it would be a human feature. So it would be boring.

Not everybody got the same gifts.
Regardles of the gifts one could do better with tools as good as one can handle.

[Edson]

Improving my scriptable-fast-highlighter, now it can accept a simple syntax of Pascal (and of many other languages).

I have made a speed comparison with the Lazarus highlighter, and it's clearly faster.

EDIT: Link removed. See the later posts.

[Edson]

Here, the new version of the Highlighter.

http://blog.pucp.edu.pe/action.php?action=plugin&name=LinkCounter&type=c&k=20140107-synfilesyn08_public.rar

It support now the "CaseSensitive" property, the ability for defining tokens like subsets of Symbols, and some improves on defining the language using file or instructions.

The more difficult part of the work was the documentation.

It includes a test program for compare the speed, using a Pascal syntax.

[Edson]

This is the last version of the Fast Scriptable Highlighter: TSynFileSyn. It is smaller, more configurable and the same fast.

Some improves have been made for the definiton of symbols and delimited tokens. Some bugs corrected. Moreover, now it supports simple folding for multilines tokens.

As usually, it includes a comparison with the Pascal HL.

http://blog.pucp.edu.pe/media/4946/20140118-synfilesyn12_public.rar