Improving Lua syntax

Hi John,

I'm sorry but I'm not really seeing anywhere in our lexer definition where we have something specifically saying a dot can come before a keyword.  The lexer just tokenizes dot characters as punctuation, the same as commas.  The free simple Lua language sample doesn't do any parsing or syntax error reporting.  It just does syntax highlighting only.

Were you expecting it to report syntax errors?  If you were looking for that functionality, our product can do that sort of thing, but you'd have to write a parser for the language and add some language services.  Our Getting Started series of QuickStarts walks you through the process of doing so.

My sample might have been confusing since I used the word error. I'm not looking to detect syntax errors. I just want to highlighter to not think that 

   .<Function>

is still a Function. It's still perfectly valid code, it just happens to be a table key. An example using c# might look like

class foo
{
  public int Console;
}

Console.WriteLine("this should be highlighted");
foo.Console = 34; // this shouldn't

 So I guess the simple rule is that a function can't have a '.' in front of it. If it does, it's not a function. Given the way Lua parses it's probably '.<whitespace>. Does that make sense?

Hi John,

Ok so in the pattern group for Function, couldn't you just do this:

LookBehindPattern="^|[^\.]"

That would say at the start of the document or not after a dot.