Re: State-machine based syntax highlighting

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Robert Thorpe wrote:
>
> If parsing were to be used to support syntax highlighting then maybe
> some work would have to be done to avoid having to use Elisp.  But I'm
> not sure since it would still require loads of regexps and they would
> probably still eat up a lot of the runtime.
>

That may be true, but the advantage is that parsing actually
understands code, not just matches it with some regexps, so it could be
used for much more than syntax highlighting (some kind of error
checking, code completion, etc.).

I think if there are already parsers written in elisp they should be
intergrated into the official emacs distribution (e.g. in directory
lisp/parsers), so that packages can use them to understand the code
better.