Re: cc-mode fontification feels random

[Stephen Leake]

Daniel Colascione <dancol@dancol.org> writes:

> ...  cc-mode is still very inconsistent in
> fontification though. Take a look at the attached screenshot, which is
> of this program:
>
> void
> deallocate_one_arg(void* const ptr_to_arg,
>                    MethodProgramPc& pc);
>
> void
> deallocate_one_arg(void* const ptr_to_arg,
>                    MethodProgramPc& pc);
>
> I'm confused about why "MethodProgramPc" is fontified as a type in the
> first prototype but not the second. I still wish we had a
> general-purpose mechanism for ensuring that problems like this didn't
> happen.

The ELPA package wisi provides a parser-based fontification engine,
which makes things like this more consistent. It is currently used for
ada-mode. Note that syntax errors in the source can cause bad
fontification, but the wisi parser has very robust error-correction, so
it usually does a good job even with syntax errors.

However, parsing C and C++ is complicated by macros; wisi makes no
provision for that.

Another option is an LSP based system via the EPLA package eglot; that
delegates fontification to the language server. I don't know how well
the C/C++ language servers perform for this.

-- 
-- Stephe