Category talk:OoRexx: Difference between revisions

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With all respect to Gerard's work, I vote unambiguously YES for syntax colouring. LPEX, the live parsing editor (one of the first), is from Mike Cowlishaw, the maker of Rexx, and inspired by his work on the Oxford dictionary; there is objective evidence of the advantages of the use of colour. I use Emacs modes for NetRexx and ooRexx that closely follow the LPEX standards, including italicised comments.

As mentioned, while editing code, there is no colouring on Rosetta, so there cannot be distraction from that. Editing code for examples should be in each author's personal environment anyway. Syntax colouring increases the status of a language - it is a fact that the wider known/used languages have colouring, the lesser known/used have not. This argument extends to PL/I which influenced Rexx and also deserves the same treatment - it seems unjustly devaluated by being shown in plain black-on-white.

On a typograhical note: if italics are bothering, and sometimes they do bother me also, most of the time the quality of the font is bad - some just use transformations of the roman glyphs and not separate italic forms, as they should. In particular, older windows versions are terrible. Changing the default font might help here. I find having the comments in italics, and preferable sea-green, isolates them in the right way from code and does not force me to re-read the comments all the time.