Re: cc-mode fontification feels random

[Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>]

> That's a rather negative way of putting things, which is a bit indefinite
> and wishy-washy.  You could instead try to specify which tokens should get
> font-lock-type-face and which shouldn't, thus giving something concrete
> to discuss.  I think this will be difficult to do well, and may lead to
> the result which I alluded to above.

It has to be said also that C/C++ is quite unusual in that knowing which
identifier is a type is necessary for correct parsing.  If it weren't
so, we could reliably highlight types not based on their name but based
on their location in the syntax.

I think an approach like that of tree-sitter should be able (at least in
theory) to give reasonably good highlighting of types based on their
position (tho sadly not in those cases where the syntax is ambiguous).

I don't have a good intuition of how often ambiguities come into play in
real code, nor how much work would be needed to disambiguate most cases
(without relying on discovery of the corresponding type declarations).

If ambiguities are rare enough and/or easy enough to disambiguate
via some simple/local heuristic, then maybe CC-mode could try to
highlight types based on their location rather than based on
their identifiers.  This would make it more stable (not dependent on
the order in which chunks are highlighted) and maybe more reliable.
But I suspect that it's not easy to do that kind of parsing, short of
doing a full parse like tree-sitter does.


        Stefan