[TxMt] language grammars

[sam aaron]

Hi there,

I'm working on a particular form of yaml (called Feedback) which I'm
using as a way of marking up suggestions for documentation. It's still
in very early days (say, about 3 hours), but I'm having trouble
writing my own language grammar for it.

An example Feedback file currently looks like this:


thesis_author: chris
version: 1
commenter: sam

errata:
  6:
    para: 1
    comments:

      -  suggestion: "_in which there are no jobs_, what are jobs?
Wouldn't it be simpler to just say that DynaSOAr (oh the pain of mixed
case acronyms!) only consists of services?"

    para: 2
    comments:

      -  query: "If you're capitalising Web service with capital W,
lower case s, why is 'Web Service Provider' all uppercase?"

      -  typo: "_who's responsibility is to recieve..._ should be
whose, and receive. Does LyX still not have a spell-checker? :-("

      -  typo: "_dynmaically_ should be dynamically"

      -  suggestion: "_The ability to dynmaically deploy services in
response to consumer requests without interruption to the invocation
gives considerable scope for different deployment patterns._ This
sentence needs breaking down."


This document describes some comments on paragraphs 1 and 2 of page 6
of chris's thesis. As you can see, there are currently three types of
comment, a query, suggestion and typo.

I would like the file to have all the features of yaml (inheriting
from the lovely yaml bundle), yet override certain things. I want
everything between underscores to be italicised (although this will
probably change due to code_variables), and I want the different types
of comment to be understood by the language grammar separately. I also
want certain keywords to be understood.

Attempting to implement these, I came up with the following:

{	scopeName = 'source.yaml.feedback';
	fileTypes = ( 'feedback' );
	patterns = (
		{	name = 'markup.italic.feedback';
			begin = '_';
			end = '_';
		},
		{	name = 'keyword.control.feedback.suggestion';
			begin = '-  suggestion: "';
			end = '"';
			patterns = (
				{	name = 'keyword.operator.feedback';
					match = 'suggestion';
				}
			);
		},
		{	include = 'source.yaml'; },
	);
}


However, I didn't get the behaviour I wanted. Nothing seems to be in
italics, the suggestion keyword is scoped as
'keyword.control.feedback.suggestion', and 'source.yaml.feedback'
only. There's no mention of 'keyword.operator.feedback'.

Is there anything obvious that I seem to be doing incorrectly? How is
it possible to get a bunch of characters to be scoped with different
names. I want to be able to write something like:

{	name = 'keyword.control.feedback';
			match = '\b(suggestion|query|typo|technical)\b';
},

I'm sorry if I'm being a numpty with this!

Thanks in advance of any help,
Sam Aaron