bug#6286: General delimited literals in ruby-mode patch

[Dmitry Gutov]

So, the patch.

On 24.04.2012 21:09, Stefan Monnier wrote:
> Here is what it does:
> - Split large regexp into more manageable chunks.

I didn't think to use match groups this way. Very nice.

> - During the split I saw that gsub/sub/split/scan were matched (for
>    regexp) without regards to what precedes them, so "asub / a + bsub / b"
>    was taken for a regexp.

This fix has uncovered another problem: "gsub", "gsub!", "sub", "sub!", 
"scan", "split", and "split!" are not special tokens, those are all 
methods on class String: http://www.ruby-doc.org/core-1.9.3/String.html

The original author just collected the methods most often used with 
regexps. And now this is broken: "abcdec".split /[be]/

One might argue that this isn't the most important use case, and that 
methods with arity > 1 are covered by the second rule (comma after), but 
5 of these 7 methods can be called with just 1 argument. So that would 
mean backward incompatibility.

> - I found a problem in your approach to handling Cucumber code.

I'm assuming you mean this:

x = toto / foo if /do bar/ =~ "dobar" # shortened version

We can add a constraint that "do" is followed by (optionally) |a, d, c| 
(block arguments), and then EOL, since do ... end syntax isn't usually 
used with one-liner blocks, especially not after a regexp argument.

Or we can revert the change and do it the original way.

I looked into how other editors deal with regular expressions in Ruby. 
Vim is whitespace-sensitive. In the example above, the highlighting 
depends on whether you put space before "foo" (so it highlights one or 
the other regexp-looking expression).

Textmate favors the whitelisting approach, like ruby-mode had pre-patch: 
http://www.ruby-forum.com/topic/170852

It has one benefit in that when you've typed the regexp, it's already 
highlighted, before you type the block keyword. Might feel more natural.

In this approach, we'd move the "hardcoded" list of special method names 
to a variable, so that users might customize it, per project.

What do you think?

And here's a patch for another issue (attached).

-- Dmitry

0001-ruby-mode-Don-t-propertize-percent-literals-inside-s.patch
Description: Text document