Re: .pl suffix (was: [MacPerl] open() misfeature? )

[herron@cogsci.ucsd.edu (Dan Herron)]

John Mignault writes:
> Alpha is actually IHMO much better than BBEdit for Perl hacking - you *can*
> do Emacs-style syntax coloring not based on file extensions, it'll capture
> MacPerl output, and on the whole, is VERY Perl-friendly. Take a look.

One quirk in Alpha's colorization, though: you specify a character that means
"this line is a comment from this point on". In Perl, of course, that'd be
'#', EXCEPT when it follows a '$' (as in $#foo for the length of array
@foo). Alpha uses a string, rather than a regexp (as far as I can tell), for
that line-comment marker, so lines that have $# show up partially in red. You
can change the tag to '# ', but then you have to be sure to leave a space
after every comment '#', and this screws up the functions that draw commented
boxes and paragraphs. I wrote to the author, but just recently, so I haven't
heard anything back.

Of course, this is but a minor, minor detraction from a great editor. If
you're using MacPerl, you should really check out Alpha (and pass on
improvements in the Perl mode to others!)

-dan