How can someone invest so much into a project which is based on such weak bones?
ShalokShalom
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Hm… I don’t want to criticise Pygments too much. Pygments is very versatile, and even though I don’t like the architecture for its lexers, it’s a fact that people have been writing new lexers. Some people might even prefer their way of writing lexers. If I were to start Pygments today, I’d use a PEG parser like Arpeggio, but they surely had their reasons to start with a state-machine based approach… Maybe there were no good PEG parsers for python in 2006? Maybe despite my opinion egexes + state-machines are easier to use than PEG parsers? Maybe people started writing things that way and then there was already too much code to change it to a different architecture? I don’t know.
My own design borrows a lot from Pygments: it has lexers, formatters and styles. The styles themselves were shamelessly copied from Pygments (by writing a python program that introspects the styles and turns them into Elixir modules), and my HTML formatter is not as feature rich as theirs. I can copy all of their features given enough time, but I’m only one person and have limited time… Have you looked at their list of contributors? They mention 212 people… My project is a joke in comparison xD
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