Tuesday February 27, 2007
Ruby Screenshot of the Week #5
Tim Bray just posted an entry on his first experiments with the Ruby and NetBeans support and in particular, talks about the syntax highlighting. I was already planning on spending this week's screenshot on the highlighting features, so I'll use Tim's ape.rb source code and show you a few more details:
Notice the following:
- Notice how unused local variables are highlighted (see
dummywhich I inserted to make a point - that's not Tim's fault!). - Notice how the symbol under the caret gets highlighted along with all other uses of the same symbol! This is pretty useful when you're dealing with blocks for example - it will show you that a local variable may be used unintentionally as a block variable and will get modified as a side effect.
- Notice how methods calls are highlighted in bold. This is handy when you have a typo, and what you thought was a local variable read is actually a call to an unbound method.
- Notice how strings are lexed too. Here you can see that it's telling you (in red italics)
"\n"is not expected as an escape code - this is a single quoted String after all. - Embedded Ruby code within Strings -
#{ }- is properly shown as Ruby code. Occurrences highlighting and code completion works in these sections too.
In doing this screenshot I noticed a couple of bugs I'm off to fix now!
(2007-02-27 14:02:59.0) Permalink Comments [9]
