UDL Styling questions

ToryG · February 23, 2015, 11:20pm

OK, I’ve finally had more time to try to work on the language, but I’m a little confused, I’ve been studying http://docs.activestate.com/komodo/8.5/udl.html#udl_introduction, however it says

For each family, we currently need to specify the style from scintilla.iface that the family will use.
Example:

start_style CSL_DEFAULT
end_style CSL_REGEX

This isn’t surprising, as the code in scintilla.iface
reads like so:

# Template: client-side language  # Start at 30
val SCE_UDL_CSL_DEFAULT=30
val SCE_UDL_CSL_COMMENT=31
val SCE_UDL_CSL_COMMENTBLOCK=32
val SCE_UDL_CSL_NUMBER=33
val SCE_UDL_CSL_STRING=34
val SCE_UDL_CSL_WORD=35
val SCE_UDL_CSL_IDENTIFIER=36
val SCE_UDL_CSL_OPERATOR=37
val SCE_UDL_CSL_REGEX=38

However I found Scintilla.iface in the Komodo source code on Github, here:

github.com

Komodo/KomodoEdit/blob/master/contrib/scintilla/include/Scintilla.iface

## First line may be used for shbang

## This file defines the interface to Scintilla

## Copyright 2000-2003 by Neil Hodgson <neilh@scintilla.org>
## The License.txt file describes the conditions under which this software may be distributed.

## A line starting with ## is a pure comment and should be stripped by readers.
## A line starting with #! is for future shbang use
## A line starting with # followed by a space is a documentation comment and refers
## to the next feature definition.

## Each feature is defined by a line starting with fun, get, set, val or evt.
##     cat -> start a category
##     fun -> a function
##     get -> a property get function
##     set -> a property set function
##     val -> definition of a constant
##     evt -> an event
##     enu -> associate an enumeration with a set of vals with a prefix

This file has been truncated. show original

And I searched the whole document, the keywords like SSL_DEFAULT, CSL_DEFAULT, etc., do not show up anywhere in that file. Then I tried to use a keyword like so:

state IN_CSL_DEFAULT
    '#' : paint(upto, CSL_DEFAULT), => SCE_C_PREPROCESSOR

Because the help doc makes it sound like we can use the style keywords from the Scintilla.iface file, but it just errors out saying “Style SCE_UDL_SCE_C_PREPROCESSOR is unknown.”

ToryG · March 4, 2015, 9:13pm

Well, it seems, that from what I have been able to gather from the documentation, that it is not possible to add this kind of support through UDL, it seems UDL is extremely limited in that it can only style the basics, such as keywords, comments, operators, identifiers, and brackets. If you want to add support for functions, classes, preprocessors, etc., there must be another way to do it (with Python maybe?), but the documentation is non-existent. Aside from editing the built in languages and recompiling I’m not so sure this can be done.

If I am wrong, please someone correct me.

Defman · March 4, 2015, 9:24pm

You have to re-write most of the CodeIntel logic if you want to add support for functions, classes, etc. So it means you MUST know what you do, your Python skills should be similar with… I don’t even know how much you must know about Python, CodeIntel, UDL and Scintilla.
So @toddw can say more about that (btw I was interested in adding new Element Types for Komodo but it’s very hard to me and I sure it’s hard to Todd too).
Also you can find Scintilla.iface by forking the repo to your local machine and navigate to <the source>/src/scintilla/include/

ToryG · March 5, 2015, 2:53am

OK, thanks for the info, that was what I was afraid of, I really wanted to add better support for C and C++, but it seems a little more difficult than I have time for at the moment.