Closed pmer closed 6 years ago
danielmai
commented
6 years ago The grammar for TLA+ is defined in page 276 (PDF page 294) of Specifying Systems.
The formal grammar of PlusCal is defined in page 57 (PDF page 60) of A PlusCal User’s Manual C-Syntax∗ Version 1.8.
Documentation on TextMate language grammar specification is at https://manual.macromates.com/en/language_grammars.
danielmai
commented
6 years ago The TLA+/C-style PlusCal/P-style PlusCal grammars that are used in the Toolbox is described in TokenizeSpec.java. Maybe this can tell us how to implement the VS Code grammar correctly for colorizing.
pmer
commented
6 years ago We're running into trouble making PlusCal programs looks different from TLA+ comments.
Let's try coloring everything in PlusCal programs.
Goal: Having it look like the TLA+ Toolbox and not be a completely separate color.
Grammar (syntax highlighting)
Grammars have two parts:
A configuration file "./language-configuration.json" in our extension. It teaches VS Code what TLA+ comments and string are. (Wait, does TLA+ have strings?)
A TextMate grammar for the language. Maybe agentultra/TLAGrammar? Looks like the same highlighter that GitHub uses when coloring TLA+ files. It lacks support for highlighting PlusCal expressions inside comments.
Also, just for fun, check this out for a read about the complexity of TLA+ grammars. It's a reminder that TLA+ expressions are even more whitespace-dependent for semantics than Python.