[darcs-users] Applying formal descriptions to files

[Trent W. Buck]

"Max Battcher" <me at worldmaker.net> writes:

> * Lexers are fast.
> * Lexers preserve the formatting of documents.
> * Lexers are dumb, but recover quickly from errors.  (Ever watched your
> editor's lexers twist through error states as you type?)

Emacs, at least, does not perform "proper" lexical analysis (except
perhaps nxml).  That is, Emacs does not turn a stream of codepoints into
a stream of lexical tokens.  Instead, it invariably just uses a bunch of
*separate* regular expressions to overlay faces on matching regions of
text.