[Oberon] Italicization of comments and emboldening of keywords.

[Chris Burrows]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Oberon [mailto:oberon-bounces at lists.inf.ethz.ch] On Behalf Of
> peter at easthope.ca
> Sent: Sunday, 30 July 2017 12:56 AM
> To: oberon at lists.inf.ethz.ch
> Subject: [Oberon] Italicization of comments and emboldening of
> keywords.
> 
> Where were these conventions applied?  All of V4, BB, CP and GPCP?
> Some of these?  In a given context, what was the level of adoption?
> 

It is only feasible to apply italicization of comments and emboldening of
keywords on systems that have prettyprinting software (e.g. V4 and BB) or
can be used with an editor with syntax-highlighting capabilities (e.g.
GPCP). Such styling would be too laborious to maintain manually. These tools
are usually configurable and include colouring capabilities as well. The
conventions adopted with any of these systems are heavily influenced by the
*default* configurations set by the author.  

With a syntax-highlighting editor the 'level of adoption' of any convention
has little meaning. The appearance of the source code is just a 'view' of
the code. The contents of the source code file is just plain text - it
doesn't contain any embedded font attributes. The view is updated
instantaneously as the source code is changed. How it appears to you just
depends on how you have configured the viewer. Similar to the way that world
might appear to be black and white to some people but it looks very
different to those who are wearing rose-tinted glasses ;-)

The *default* syntax-highlighting options in CPIde (our IDE for GPCP) are:

* Reserved Words: Dark Blue / Bold
* Comments: Gray / Italic
* SYSTEM functions:  Red / Bold
* Strings: Green / Normal.
etc.

Consequently, unterminated strings can be easily spotted; comments are
visible but are easily differentiated from actual code - useful if (heaven
forbid!) you are in the habit of commenting-out code. 

On the other hand SYSTEM functions deliberately really stand out.

Chris Burrows
CFB Software
http://www.cfbsoftware.com/CPIde