[erlang-questions] The quest for the perfect programming language for massive concurrency.

[Magnus Henoch]

"Richard A. O'Keefe" <ok@REDACTED> writes:

>> 3) Syntax coloring. (VIM color codes a file so that is there, emacs I don't know AT ALL.)
> To which Steve Strong replied
>> I don’t know of any editor that doesn’t do this -
>> even github displays syntax colouring on erlang files. 
>
> My own text editor doesn't do syntax colouring.
> Frankly, I hate syntax colouring.  I could give you
> a long rant about why.  One big issue is that the
> name is a lie.  It's *lexical* colouring; the colour
> depends on what kind of token something is.  But I
> can *see* that.  If you offered me an editor where
> calls to functions whose definitions had been edited
> recently were brightly coloured, or where the functions
> imported from a particular module were brightly coloured,
> or where slicing was used to colour the places where a
> particular variable could be *changed* and *used*, I'd
> find that really really helpful.  Why waste colour
> telling me something that is already obvious at a glance?
> [...]

I feel I should mention, in case any Emacs users missed it, that the
Emacs Erlang mode recently took a small step in this direction.  It is
now possible to have different colours for the function name in a
function definition depending on whether the function is exported or not
(though the default settings use the same colour for both cases).  Set
erlang-font-lock-exported-function-name-face to suit your taste.

Regards,
Magnus