[photran] Comments on the editor of Photran 3.1 beta

[Miguel Hermanns <hermanns@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Ok, already running the new beta of Photran 3.1 :-). Now some comments 
in my favorite topic, namely highlighting & Co. The points I'm gonna 
mention are not new and I already pointed them out in the previous 
version of Photran.

Why is there no option to set "Highlight matching brackets", like in the 
C/C++ Editor Preferences? This is a very nice feature, which was 
available in Photran 2.1. After the integration of multi-language 
support into CDT, some common configurations like this shall (IMHO) go 
to a common Editor preferences dialog, and not to a language specific 
one. In this way it would be automatically set for Fortran editing as well.

It would also be great to have more control over the colors used for the 
syntax highlighting. I know that a pure language-neutral dialog box does 
not make sense, but it could be just like the one of C/C++, but with 
Fortran code shown in the preview and tailored entries in the Foreground 
box. Again, now that it is integrated into CDT it should be easier to do 
these things, or? Somebody pointed out once that to write an add-oc 
editor for the preview box was necessary. Instead, a "false" editor 
could be used, where only the text is output using the colors specified.

Also very useful would be to have a color for the intrinsic procedures 
of Fortran (like max, ubound, cos, matmul, etc) and not only for the 
commands (like if, then, do, end, etc). That helps a lot in reading the 
code, specially now that the parser is more intelligent and able to 
distinguish variables from commands with the same name.

Now some examples of bugs in the highlighting (or parser?). In the 
following example the variable Type is highlighted as a command, while 
it is a variable:

do j = 0, Number_Nodes_y, Number_Nodes_y
  do i = 0, Number_Nodes_x, Number_Nodes_x

    Type = Grid%Nodal_Property(i,j)

    ...

In the following example the words "carriagecontrol" and "recordtype" 
are not highlighted like the words "file" and "form":

  open(542, file            = trim(Initial_Condition), &
            form            = 'unformatted',           &
            carriagecontrol = 'none',                  &
            recordtype      = 'stream'                 )
  ...

In the following example several wrong highlightings appear. In the 
first line the & at the end is marked in string color, while in the 
second line the symbols )' near the end are marked in command color:

write(*,'("t = ",f11.3,", log(R_max) = ",f8.4, ", log(R_mean) = ",f8.4,&
          ", CPU_t = ",f8.1, "s, CPU_dt = ",f5.1,"s")') &
          Time, log10(R_max), log10(R_mean), real(time2 - time0) / 1d6,&
          real(time2 - time1) / 1d6

Another thing I have noticed is that the Outline at the right of the 
editor remains now always empty. Have you disabled it temporarely to 
work on it, or is it a bug in the beta?

Hope my comments and suggestions are helpful :-)

Thanks in advance for your help and greetings from Spain,

Miguel Hermanns