GNU Source-highlight 2.8

Apart from the usual bug fixes, the main novelties of this release are:

• Language definition for S-Lang (thanks to John E. Davis)
• Perl and Javascript highlighting was improved
• C-style comments are not defined as nested (I swear I never knew this, though I've been programming in C++ and Java for years... shame on me :-)
• The padding character of line numbers can be specified (it does not have to be 0, e.g., it could be a blank space), thanks to Roger Nilsson.
  

Furthermore, I extended the language definition syntax a little bit, in order to handle, what I called, dynamic backreferences (to distinguish them from the backreferences of standard regular expressions).

With dynamic backreferences you can refer to a string matched by the regular expression of the first element of a delim specification. This is crucial in cases when the rigth delimiter depends on a subexpression matched by the left delimiter; for instance, Lua comments can be of the shape --[[ comment ]] or --[=[ comment ]=], but not --[=[ comment ]] neither --[[ comment ]=] (furthermore, they can be nested). Thus, the regular expression of the right element depends on the one of the left element.

A dynamic backreference is similar to a variable, but there's no declaration, and have the shape of

     @{number}

where number is the number of the marked subexpression in the left delimiter (source-highlight will actually check that such a marked subexpression exists in the left delimiter).

For instance, this is the definition of Lua comments (see also lua.lang):

     environment comment delim `--\[(=*)\[` "]" + @{1} + "]"
               multiline nested begin
     include "url.lang"
     ...
   end

Notice how the left delimiter can match an optional =, as a marked subexpression, and the right delimiter refers to that with @{1}.

Source-highlight will take care of escaping possible special characters during dynamic backreference substitutions. For instance, suppose that you must substitute | for @{1}, because we matched | with the subexpression [^[:alnum:]] in a delim element like the following one:

     comment delim `([^[:alnum:]])` @{1}

Since | is a special character in regular expression syntax source-highlight will actually replace @{1} with \|.

Finally, although this is not related to this new release of source-highlight, Roger Nilsson wrote a frontend for source-highlight that is used in a popular webdesign app for OSX called RapidWeaver. The frontend is called High-Light and allows users to easily add syntax-colored code inside RapidWeaver.

http://nilrogsplace.se/webdesign/rapidweaver/plugins/high-light/index_en.html