[RkWard-devel] R Syntax Highlighting

[Thomas Friedrichsmeier]

Hi,

> I installed rkward and I think it looks very promising! I noticed that
> rkward uses an extended version of Egon Willighagen's syntax highlighting
> definitions. Since Egon does not maintain this file any more, I took over
> his job and also extended the R syntax highlighting definitions. They can
> be downloaded from my homepage (scroll to the very bottom):
> http://www.uni-kiel.de/agrarpol/ahenningsen/index-e.html
> Does rkward require special syntax highlighting definitions or can we merge
> the two branches and just maintain only one file?

When I added kate/syntax-highlighting, I found the syntax-highlighting shipped 
with KDE to be rather limited, and I wasn't aware of your version, so that's 
why I extended it myself. In fact, now you can download a new kate-hl 
definition from http://kate.kde.org/hl/, which contains some of those 
extensions/changes. I also submitted the hl-definition RKWard is using 
currently to kwrite-devel at kde.org, but apparently that slipped past attention 
and I did not bother to nag.
Of course it would be preferrable to have a single merged hl-definition. 
There's no real reason to maintain separate versions. For now, I'll continue 
to ship the hl-definition, since I feel it's better than the version KDE/kate 
comes with, but that's just a temporary solution.
As to the hl-definition itself: It would be cool, if you could maintain the 
hl-definition. I'm happy about every bit of work I don't have to do myself. 
Technically, you'll note that the most visible difference between our 
definitions is, that I did not bother to add a special handling for named 
arguments. I felt that since it's not easily possible to identify 
symbol-names outside of "foo (...)", it was not worth the effort to do so 
inside function calls, either. Also, it would be rather difficult to 
correctly handle (unusual) constructs like:

list (x=(a=c (1, 2, 3)), y=c(2, 3, 4))

(i.e. assignments using "=" inside a function-call, which are not named 
arguments). Other than that, there are some differences in detail. It should 
be easily possible to merge those.
Would you like to work on merging the two versions?

Thomas