Re: Using syntax info for font-locking?

[Dieter Wilhelm <dieter@duenenhof-wilhelm.de>]

spamfilteraccount@gmail.com writes:

> Some people here
>
>       http://erlide.sourceforge.net/
>
> badmouths Emacs (the heretics! :), because it cannot provide as good
> syntax highlighting for Erlang as their Eclipse-based Erlang IDE.
>
> As far as I know they use the actual syntax information provided by an
> Erlang node to do syntax highlighting.
>
> I'm not very familiar with the implementation of font locking in Emacs.
> If real-time syntax info for the current source file is available then
> could Emacs use it for font locking?

It can be done, some guy on this list pointed me to the possibility of
specifying functions instead of regexps in the font-lock mechanism.

I'm using this for font-locking of user defined variables in a certain
programming mode.  My impressions, so far, are that that this is
rapidly becoming computationally very expensive for larger files.  I'm
not so deep into font-locking, there might be some tricks out there
which take advantage of syntactical checks Emacs is doing anyway.  But
at my state of knowledge the consequence of this "dynamic"
font-locking means to check after *any* self inserting key the whole
file and re-fontify it.

>
> Or font locking in Emacs is always static, done with predefined regexps
> and stuff?

So far I found only static examples.  I too hope in this thread
there'll pipe up examples to the contrary.

-- 
    Best wishes

    H. Dieter Wilhelm
    Darmstadt, Germany