Better Number Highlighting in DrJava More Difficult

Getting the lexing right for the syntax highlighting will be a little
bit more work than I thought. Right now, DrJava tokenizes numbers like
3.14 separately as “3” “.” “14”, and then it highlights “3” and “14”
as numbers. That approach never was quite right, but I think it gets
even uglier with the new literals.

I’m continuing the process of giving the compiler adapters more
responsibility. The first step that I made for supporting HJ and Mint
was to put the list of keywords into the adapters. I was now going to
put the highlight determination into the adapters, but it seems like I
may have to put tokenization there as well.

Of course, that fits well with plans of eventually supporting more languages, and languages that differ more.

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About Mathias

Software development engineer. Principal developer of DrJava. Recent Ph.D. graduate from the Department of Computer Science at Rice University.
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