Sublime Forum

Generic Question about Syntax Workflow

#1

Apart from the references generally found in SublimeText documentation and this answer on SO, I have some questions about the workflow of sublime.syntax development that I couldn’t find an answer for.

  1. Do we have any Debugger for the grammar in YAML, like some lexer do for YACC or BNF?
  2. How can we translate the BNF description of a language into YAML?
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#2

1. Debugging

Debugging is mainly handled via the syntax_test files. The tests are executed via build system. The output shows which scopes are not correctly assigned - just like a unittest

Example of an syntax_test_java.java

// SYNTAX TEST "Packages/Java/Java.sublime-syntax"

package apple;
// <- meta.namespace.package.java storage.type.namespace.package.java keyword.declaration.namespace.package.java
//^^^^^ meta.namespace.package.java - meta.path
//     ^^^^^^ meta.namespace.package.identifier.java - meta.path
//^^^^^ keyword.declaration.namespace.package.java
//      ^^^^^ entity.name.namespace.package.java
//           ^ punctuation.terminator.java

2. Tranforming BNF to sublime-syntax

While BNF is declarative, sublime-syntax is imperative. The Scala.sublime-syntax seems to closely follow its BNF scheme from the specs. Not sure if we can describe a general way for simply transform a BNF to sublime-syntax though.

You may want to put the simplest entities into variables to be able to re-use them. More complex variables may be worth a dedicated context, which can be included wherever needed. … a bit tricky to decribe without an example.

Maybe reading the scala specs and comparing with the sublime-syntax can give a first impression.

Basically it’s like writing normal programms. Each context is a function, which matches a couple of related things. Each context can contain of matches or include other contexts. Each match can eigther simply scope a token or push/set a new context onto the stack, with another set of match rules. E.g. matching a { pushes into a dedicated stack with its own rules and } popping off again returning to the original ones. …

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