I want to add some additional syntax highlighting definitions to an existing bundle, but I need some general advice on how to do this. I'm not building a syntax from scratch, and I think my request is pretty simple, but I think it involves some subtleties for which I find the manual somewhat impenetrable in finding the answer.
Basically, I'm trying to fill out the syntax definitions for the Stata bundle. It's great, but there is no built in support for automatically highlighting the base commands and the installed functions, only a handful of basic control statements. Stata is a language which is primarily used by calling lots of different high level pre-defined command calls, like command foo bar, options(). The convention is that these command calls be highlighted.
There are a ton of these commands, and stubs which are used for convenience. Just the base install has almost 3500. Even optimizing them using the bundle helper, which obviously gets rid of the stub issue, still yields a massive regex list. I can easily cut this down to less than 1000 important ones, but its still a lot. There are also 350 "functions" which I would like to match with the syntax function()
I essentially have 3 questions:
- Am I creating a serious problem by including a very comprehensive list of matching definitions?
- How do I restrict a
commandto only highlight when it either begins a line or there is only whitespace between the beginning line and the command - What is the preferred way of restricting the list of
functions()to only highlight when they have attached parentheses?
