Re: How to add pseudo vector types

[Stephen Leake <stephen_leake@stephe-leake.org>]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

>> From: Yuan Fu <casouri@gmail.com>
>>
>> when a language’s grammar changes, I don’t think we need to update
>> them often, or ever. And It is not harder than updating
>> font-lock-keywords when a language adds a new fancy syntax.
>
> It isn't an immediate problem, so we can delay it for later.
>
> However, I do worry about the ability to update this in some
> non-manual way.  Take for example the way we update our character
> databases when Unicode adds more characters/scripts: we use the data
> files distributed by the Unicode Consortium

If the language concerned has some standard definition that is machine
readable, then we could get partway there.

But no language standard specifies fontification (or indent), so there
is no standard machine-readable description of these.

tree-sitter provides a defacto standard for specifying fontification (in
the highlight rules files); it would make sense for emacs to be able to
read those files directly, along with linking to the corresponding
tree-sitter parser. There would have to provide a separate mapping from
tree-sitter notation to emacs font names. 

wisi provides a mechanism to describe fontification and indentation in
the grammar source file; every time ISO releases a new Ada language
version, I have to compare them and incorporate the changes. I've
written code to partly automate this (the language reference manual
contains the grammar in a variant of EBNF in an appendix, which is
mostly machine-readable), but it's highly Ada specific, and still mostly
a manual process. Fortunately it only happens every 10 years for Ada :).

Many languages provide some EBNF description of the language, but it is
often in a form that is not suitable for whatever parser generator you
are using; it is usually optimized for human understanding. I made it a
requirement for the wisi parser generator to use the Ada reference
grammar as closely as possible, but I still have to modify the grammar
to get reasonable performance. You can find many different Java grammars
on the web, optimized for different parser generators (there are two
different but nominally equivalent grammars in the Java docs).

--
-- Stephe