Weird Lexical Syntax
I just learned 42 programming languages this month to build a new syntax highlighter for llamafile. I feel like I'm up to my eyeballs in programming languages right now. Now that it's halloween, I thought I'd share some of the spookiest most surprising syntax I've seen.
The languages I decided to support are Ada, Assembly, BASIC, C, C#, C++, COBOL, CSS, D, FORTH, FORTRAN, Go, Haskell, HTML, Java, JavaScript, Julia, JSON, Kotlin, ld, LISP, Lua, m4, Make, Markdown, MATLAB, Pascal, Perl, PHP, Python, R, Ruby, Rust, Scala, Shell, SQL, Swift, Tcl, TeX, TXT, TypeScript, and Zig. That crosses off pretty much everything on the TIOBE Index except Scratch, which can't be highlighted, since it uses blocks instead of text. How To Code a Syntax Highlighter
It's really not difficult to implement a syntax highlighter. You could probably write one over the course of a job interview. My favorite tools for doing this have been C++ and GNU gperf. The hardest problem here is avoiding the need to do a bunch of string comparisons to determine if something is a keyword or not. Most developers would just use a hash table, but gperf lets you create a perfect hash table. For example: %{ #include <string.h> %} %pic %compare-strncmp %language =ANSI-C %readonly-tables %define lookup-function-name is_keyword_java_constant %% true false null
