I may implement this in http://solutionsfactory.macaw.nl/ , and I’m looking for good strategies to implement intellisense autocomplete, syntax highlighting and error squiggles.

I’m focusing on designing simple, small languages that require only a simple (combined) antlr grammar for the purpose of generating output (PowerShell statements). These are not C like languages but very simple, only containing a handful of statements, identifiers, literals, and lists and tables of values.

After reading your posts, the Antlr books, and playing around with Antlr and VS2010 Editor extensibility, I have these questions:

1) How would you implement syntax coloring and autocomplete from a simple, combined grammar (output=template) instead of a tree grammar? Is using an AST grammar only needed for performance or is it also the simplest way to get both intellisense and translation? My languages are very simple and do not require an AST for translation to output. I would rather have one grammar than two grammars for a language, as long as that will not make the combined grammar too hard to read.

2) How do you structure your grammar for incomplete/invalid input? Do you create two grammars, one for syntax coloring and autcomplete that handles incomplete, invalid input, and one for validation & translation that requires complete, valid input? Or would you introduce some sort of ‘mode’ parameter for the parser rules to indicate how strict they should be? I want to keep my grammars as uncomplicated as possible.

PS You have not been posting here for a long time, have you been working on VS2010 – Antlr integration after Jan 2010? I’d really like to see more posts on this, working code for Antlr – VS2010 MEF integration with intellisense ‘done right’ would be great.

Thx for any help you may be able to offer.