[TxMt] Language Grammar TXP retrospect

[marios]

Hi again, to all,

I am writing this to get a couple of evaluation thoughts together, on
the Language Grammar, that I wrote for the TXP Bundle.
It is not solely related to that Bundle only, so you may find this
useful, if you attempt a similar approach for other Languages.

I have spent the last two days inspecting this Grammar in detail and
iterating over the current approach and trying to extract the major
mistakes, so I can refactor the Grammar and make it more accessible to
TM's Automation Features.

In a nutshell, the Grammar is largely inspired and adapted from the
experimental XHTML Bundle, following a modular approach,by referencing
repository Items with include rules.
The difference is, that in the experimental XHTML Bundle, each
repository Item is referenced a in recursive manner, and resolves in one
exclusive repository Item that stands  for the html tag for html tags as
exclusive root node.
Textpattern Tags on the other hand do not have this requirement, so each
repository Item gets referenced within an include rule,except for their
attributes and values, which do not have an include rule at the root.

In order to make those non root included items easily accessible a
naming convention was used, so that after reformating the code in the
Bundle Editor appears exactly below the Repository Item, that references
them, where there is one for each Tag.

Example:

	author-tag =
		{	
		};
		author-tagatts = {
		};

The major difficulty is in the distinction of single, container, plugin
and conditional tags, plus to get scopes also for the attribute values.
which currently leads to matching conflicts, therefore, the current
version of the Grammar doesn't have full distinction for attribute
values, mainly on the single plugin tags.

One verification, that I have done about the shortcoming of this
Grammar, is that it is wrong not to have a simple include for quoted
single and double strings, which is now the case.
For instance if I used cntrl shift < and  then typed txp:article space
and then get the automatic closing quote insertion, the cursor will be
in between "".
At this point verifying Scope with cntrl shift P, I should have at least
a scope of string.quoted.double or any other dist. available.
If this is not the case,all the additional automation possibilities are
lost since I can not have a snippet insertion conditional.

On the other hand, while including a rule for such a scope left me with
the problem of specificity of such rules, making it again difficult to
have a distinct scope of attribute.value, that would match only a
string, that is in between the quotes, but has another scope then
string.quoted.double


To be continued,

regards, marios