A Syntax Highlighting and Code Formatting Tool for Extensible Languages

Domain specific languages are sometimes useful to make it easier to express solutions to problems in a specific domain compared to general purpose programming languages. There are a number of tools available to create such languages, either as separate languages or by extending an existing language. One large problem with creating languages or language extensions is that existing tools are unaware of the new language, and therefore unable to properly assist the programmer unless all such tools are extended to support the new language. Extending all tools to support the new language is often a large enough task to be infeasible, especially for small languages. In this thesis, we propose using the compiler of the extensible language Storm to provide the information required for a text editor to provide syntax highlighting and code formatting. By using the Storm compiler to provide the required information, it is possible to use the Storm language definitions for syntax highlighting and code formatting in addition to compiling the language. This means that syntax highlighting and code formatting can be provided without requiring the language author to maintain multiple implementations of the language. The solution is evaluated by comparing the correctness and the responsiveness of the syntax highlighting to Emacs