PatternGroup takes precedence over ChildState

Hi Eben,

It is a greedy parser so that means that once it starts matching a pattern, it will continue until a stop condition is met. What I suspect is that your internal string patterns encompass the < character, therefore meaning that the parser never stops at that point to try and match a new pattern, which would make your CodeState start tag get picked up. So you might want to exclude the < character from your internal string pattern and let the state's default pick it up if a CodeState start tag is not found there.

Our sample app is great for debugging custom languages. You can browse to open a language and then when you move the caret over a character, in the status bar it gives you information about what the parser has parsed for the Token under the caret. If a Token begins on a character, an asterisk (*) will appear there too. That's very helpful since in this case you want to see an asterisk at the < character if you have your language set up correctly.