Thursday, June 16, 2005

After finishing up my given / when patch for Boo, which adds a construct like

given value:

when "hello":

print "Value found!

to the language. Its essentially an enhanced "switch" construct. The patch has a few flaws that I think are due to bugs in the Boo compiler, but Rodrigo hasn't been around lately, so I can't prod him for information. I just submitted the patch in hopes that someone else can diagonse the problem. Rodrigo is the lead developer for the Boo language. ;)

I got my Visual Studio 2005 Team Suite DVDs two days ago, and since then I've been working on a Boo plug-in. I have intentions to make it open-source (BSD/MIT license) since nothing in the EULA explicitly states that I cannot - the only clause that comes close is the boilerplate "You can't do anything that requires the source of this product to be delievered," which is A-OK: I wouldn't want to put someone in that position anyway, which is why all my code is BSD/MIT. BSD/MIT? The licenses are so similar I can barely differentiate between them anymore.

So far I have syntax colorization "kinda sorta" working. I don't know how to handle nested comments or nested triple-quoted strings since there's really no way to keep track of rank - the class that apparently calls IScanner implementations, which handle finding tokens in the current file, does so in a line-by-line way. This means there's no guarntee that the next line you evaluated is right after the line you last evaluated.

I posted on forums.microsoft.com about possible work-arounds, but no answer yet.

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