What language constructs are available

[anthonykulis]

This question may be outstanding for a bit. Lets make the assumption the preferred language is python although its doesn't really matter. Is it best to go with a single event loop concept, a mutli-threaded, etc? Is it going to be a state machine? Are we going to keep a cached version of the page or read it on every keystroke, matched keystroke, etc? Think about what is the best way to handle this. Make sure when reviewing other plugins this is in the back of your mind.

[anthonykulis]

@jonlegacy hey, lets try to close this out by dec 20... the date on the milestone

[picchietti]

[DOCUMENTATION]

We should make sure our plugin doesn't run on the main sublime thread for performance reasons.

From a general programming sense we would easily think to tackle this problem by either:

1. Using one or several very complex regular expressions.
2. Using a state machine/lexical analyzer to parse through the char's manually.

However, we are using sublime text, its api's, and python, so we are not starting from scratch. Some constructs already exist. To define highlighting and completions for buffers of text we need to find the meaningful areas of text or "scopes". These scopes can then be highlighted or completed.

To break the text buffers into scopes sublime uses the ".tmLanguage" files. It is a plist xml file. It takes regular expressions and scope names and defines a scope for texts that match the regex. Please note that sublime uses Oniguruma style regex instead of the more common perl style.

Snippets can be used with scopes. They search for something within a scope and then work with it, usually inserting or substituting text. This will be useful for auto completion.

Scope text can be colored with themes. This will be useful for text highlighting/colorizing.

Please note:

• plists can be generated with json if we so choose. This is done by the AAAPackageDev that Reese mentioned.
• can apply to multiple scopes at once.

Useful files (used to implement some of the things discussed above):

• ".tmLanguage" - tokenizes into scopes
• ".sublime-snippet" - use for auto-completion
• ".tmTheme" - text color theme
• ".tmPreferences" - overrides preferences?

Useful python modules to import:

• re (regular expressions)
• threading (to extend threading.Thread Threads)