From: "Daniel H. Luecking" 
On Wed, 10 Dec 1997, James C. Sewell wrote:
> At 03:13 PM 12/10/97 +1100 Ross_Boyd@tnt.com.au, whom God loves, said:
> >
> >There is no way around this except to provide a new comment delimiter 
> >type which has the special attribute that it applies only to BOL 
> >comments.
> 
> Hi all,
>   I was thinking about hiliting too, although it was not a BOL type
> comment.  Anyway, ( Hey Sammy! ) would it be practical and prudent
> to build a Regular Expression parser into the syntax hiliting?
[snipped]
> 
> Whatcha think, guys?  Can you do it and do you think it's worth the
> extra effort/time?
> 
> Non-SemWare programmer types -- do you think there would be a big
> demand for such a feature?
I don't think I could make much use of syntax highlighting if it didn't
have this feature. I made an attempt early on to get highlighting
working for TeX. The problem is that TeX provides for defining new
commands, so essentially _anything_ that satisfies the following is a
command: 
  a backslash followed by any number of letters [a-zA-Z] 
or 
  a backslash followed by any single nonletter (even a space).
As a regular expression this is easy: \\{[a-zA-Z]#}|{[~a-zA-Z]}. But no
finite list of keywords would suffice.
> 
> BTW, it works great as is and "you done good".
Not only did you do a great deal of good, you managed to do it well :-)
Dan Luecking                           Dept. of Mathematical Sciences     
luecking@comp.uark.edu                 University of Arkansas      
http://comp.uark.edu/~luecking/        Fayetteville, AR 72101
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