[MacPerl] The nice folks at BBEdit

[jmf9936@is4.nyu.edu (Josh)]

Hi all,

I wrote to <support@barebones.com> a while ago with several complaints
about the Perl handling code and some examples that would illustrate
behaviour I particularly hated, including BBEdit trying to balance quoted
parens (especially those in regexs). Lo and behold, several of the
complaints were fixed by version 4.0.4. They are working on this stuff, but
it is hard.

Here's some of what the guy I 'spoke' to said:

>In reply to your question, the syntax coloring incorporated in BBEdit is
>currently dependent on the predefined languages supported by the function
>browser, and there is no way to change or extend these.
>
>Our major initial concern in adding syntax coloring was doing it cleanly so
>as to preserve optimal editing performance, which required fairly
>significant work on the text engine. Due to other technical considerations,
>it was not feasible to make language definitions or keywords
>user-extensible in BBEdit 4.0, although that is our final goal.  In
>particular, we have gotten numerous requests for updates to the Perl
>support, and will roll these in as soon as we can.


Then, later, about Emacs being able to handle more Perl syntax than BBEdit
could:

>'Tis true :-)  I understand your frustration with this behavior, but our
>parser has simply not had as long to 'season' in the field as other stuff,
>like Emacs', so it can be confused by such things. As we run across
>instances of general relevance, we will try to address them.

I take this to mean they want feedback.


Then per my suggestion that they just embed Perl (there is, after all,
exactly *one* accurate Perl interpreter):

>                                            [...] Embedded Perl might be
>cool, and stranger things have happened :-) but practically speaking, is
><low on the probability scale.

It might not be as low anymore ... I have no clue how easy it really is to
use the embeded perl interpreter code included in the new Perl5 package.


I get the impression they really are trying to put Perl in there ASAP, but
it's a monster of a language. So send them your worst peeves, with
examples.

Personally, I'd like to have a "Dumb Heuristics" option which will put
anything that vaguely looks like the start of a subroutine into the
PopUpFuncs menu ... most of the code I work on is not done (yet :^)) so
I've always got several spare open parens lying around, and it really cuts
down on the effectiveness of the PopUpFuncs menu.

Hope this is somewhat useful,
                              Josh

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