ENBF or similar for making zsh etc aware of a programs' syntax? (was: "Re: minor annoyance with zsh and git flow" on -users)

[Richard Hartmann <richih.mailinglist@gmail.com>]

Hi all,

moving to -workers and including full quote below.

Basically, my idea was to define a generic syntax file for programs,
potentially using ENBF. That could be used to (auto)build completions,
colour the prompt, syntax-check commands and scripts, automated tests,
automagic building/verification of piped commands and a ton of other
things. Also, this could be shared between various programs. zsh is
obviously my main concern, but I can see this being useful across
various tools and programs. If upstreams were to maintain these
definitions, all shells and other programs interacting with a piece of
software would be able to always know what to send to and expect,
eliminating version issues, etc.

This should probably be coordinated via/pushed to freedesktop.org at some point.

I am poking this issue once again as I just stumbled across something
that could also be solved by this approach:


~ % git config -l
zsh: correct 'config' to '.config'? [N/y/a/e] a
~ %


Feedback?
Richard


On Thu, May 26, 2011 at 13:16, Richard Hartmann
<richih.mailinglist@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, May 26, 2011 at 02:22, Bart Schaefer <schaefer@brasslantern.com> wrote:
>
>> Of course the root of all this is that "subcommands" are not a concept
>> that unix-derived shells were ever designed to deal with.  This ...
>
> You are raising an interesting point. Realistically speaking, love it
> or hate it, this kind of syntax will only become more common over time
> which means a way to deal with this generically would be helpful.
>
> Of course, this more or less requires zsh to actually know what
> commands a program can understand and with what syntax. Part of this
> information could be gleaned from completions, I guess.
>
> A different approach would be to define syntax files for commands
> (EBNF?) which could be distributed with the programs themselves or at
> least shared between shells. Dreaming some more, this could then even
> be helpful for zsh's long-long-term possibility of syntax highlighting
> capabilities..
>
>
> I'll stop babbling now, but the more I think about it, the more I
> think it's an interesting idea...
>
>
> Richard
>
> PS: If zsh, Bash, fish, you name it could generate their own
> completion definitions from EBNF or similar, this could be a huge
> boost to having current completions everywhere.
>
> PPS: And it could even solve the old "keep zsh's git completion in
> git's git or zsh's" debate.
>



-- 
Richard