Re: Jed Development

[Josh Guilfoyle <jasta@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, Jan 14, 2003 at 06:51:18PM -0500, John E. Davis wrote:
> Josh Guilfoyle <jasta@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > That said, I now know of a way to work around this limitation in libpcre and I
> > think it could actually be used as the DFA implementation, providing
> > INFINITELY more flexibility, unfortunately it would require a massive change
> > to the project itself (updating all the rules etc) and I seriously doubt John
> > is up to task...sigh, has anyone requested to takeover maint?
> 
> I do not think that you are being very fair with your criticism of my
> handling of your patch.  In my patches list, I can see only one patch
> from you, dated 29 Aug 2001.  The reason I put it on the back burner was
> because of your description of it, which included:

My wording was harsher than my intention, I apologize.

> 
> > dfa_syntax_highlight() was also modified to take a Line * and it will
> > iterate itself (currently does not handle Screen_Buffer offsets, just uses
> > the entire buffer...very ineffecient, please change it/rewrite it,
> > whatever... :)
> 
> and ends with the postscript:
> 
> > P.S. I will send the patch per your request, it's dirty and I don't want
> > you to have to see it until you read this ::ashamed:: ;)
> 
> From this description, I concluded that the patch was too premature,

You were correct.  If I were to seriously request this be implemented I would
rewrite it.

> and if I remember correctly, sometime about that time I was trying to
> get the original author (who is also the author of "putty") of the DFA
> syntax highlighting code to add support for multiline structures.

What happened with that?  If it has fallen to the floor, I would like to
revive it, but I have to warn you that I would likely rip out a lot more of
the hardcoded logic.  To me, it is not warranted :)

> 
> > All regular expression systems are "based" on DFA, so it would be beneficial
> > to just rip this from a freely available library.  Not to mention defining
> > your own syntax is just a silly idea.
> 
> DFA syntax highlighting has been in jed for quite a number of years,
> and may pre-date PCRE.  It works on all OSs supported by jed, including
> VMS.

While this is an understandable position, jed is significantly limited by it's
inability to provide more complex regular-expression based matches to improve
syntax highlighting in many different modes.  Although, I think I may tend to
agree with you that it would be better to simply improve or overhaul the
current DFA implementation.  I think I may revisit this in the next couple of
weeks provided my work will be accepted into the main branch.  We should
discuss this in more detail :)

> 
> --John
> 

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