The aim of this project is to design and implement a scalable converter from Rascal grammars to TextMate grammars. TextMate grammars generated in this way are intended to be included in VS Code extensions to provide syntax highlighting (complementary to Rascal's existing support for semantic highlighting).
In general, there are two possible approaches:
- total conversion: produce equivalent TextMate rules for all Rascal non-terminals;
- partial conversion: produce equivalent TextMate rules for some Rascal
non-terminals "of interest" (e.g., those with a
@categorytag).
Due to the significant differences in expressiveness of Rascal grammars and TextMate grammars, this project applies partial conversion. Alternatively, a previous project by @TarVK applies total conversion.
The walkthrough explains the main ideas behind the conversion algorithm in this project.
To test tokenization (as part of the conversion
tests),
the vscode-tmgrammar-test
tool is used. Install it locally in directory rascal-textmate-core as follows:
npm install vscode-tmgrammar-test