Hey as a project to improve my programing skills I've begun programing a nice code editor in python to teach myself project management, version control, and gui programming. I was wanting to utilize syntax files made for other programs so I could have a large collection already. I was wondering if there was any kind of universal syntax file format much in the same sense as .odt files. I heard of one once in a forum, it had a website, but I can't remember it now. If not I may just try to use gedit syntax files or geany.
thanks
Not sure what .odt has to do with any of this.
I could see some sort of BNF being able to describe (almost) any syntax: Just run the text and the BNF through a parser, and apply a color scheme to the terminals. You could even get a bit more fancy, since you'd have the syntax tree.
In reality, I think most syntax files take an easier approach, such as regular expressions. This would put then somewhere above regular expressions but not really quite context-free in terms of power.
As for file formats, if you re-use something that exists, then you can just loot and pillage (subject to license agreements) their syntax file data.
Universal syntax file format?