Thank you for working on this!

Naive question: since Julia exposes the parser interface (as explained in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=osdeT-tWjzk), wouldn't it be easier (and more reliable) give it the code and extract the information from the parse tree, rather than using regexes?

I believe I read that the reason one doesn't do that is that syntax highlighting should work even when you haven't finished typing or your code isn't entirely correct. It also should be quite fast. Being 100% accurate isn't that important with syntax highliting.

You sir (the author) are a gentleman.

This is really enabling and a generous act of open-sourcing.

Thank you!

He is indeed - I was fortunate enough to work with Wilfred and he is truly passionate about OSS!

Wow, I wasn't expecting to see this on HN.

Thanks for the kind words :)

One thing that confused me about your article, for a moment, was a matter of terminology, as applied to lexical tokens in most programming languages:

[]: these things are square brackets, or brackets for short

(): these things are parentheses

{}: these things are curly braces, or braces for short

Can this be made to work with the ESS julia mode?

ESS includes a fork of julia-mode. I'm hoping to replace this with a dependcy on julia-mode, so ESS benefits from all the highlighting improvements we're doing. See https://github.com/emacs-ess/ESS/issues/119

I need a language that can produce standalone binary executables. Regrettably, Julia will never get there. It's a lab hack tool for some efficiency glue between two Python scripts. As it is, we need a bury-it-where-nobody-can-find-it shovel and not syntax highlighting. But if anything can get this done, it's emacs.

How do you know that. I am pretty sure I've seen the Julia creators talk about generating binaries. Anyway neither Python nor Ruby does this either and yet that hasn't stopped them from being successful.