[cwn] Attn: Development Editor, Latest Caml Weekly News

[Alan Schmitt]

Hello,

Here is the latest Caml Weekly News, for the week of September 30 to  
October 07, 2008.

1) The OSP end-of-summer meeting
2) Syntax highlighting and Ocaml/PHP integration

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1) The OSP end-of-summer meeting
Archive: <http://groups.google.com/group/fa.caml/browse_thread/thread/c05428264231bbf3# 
 >
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** Yaron Minsky announced:

For those of you interested in what happened at the OSP end-of-summer
meeting, I posted my summary on our blog.

<http://ocaml.janestreet.com/?q=node/38>
			
** Stefano Zacchiroli then suggested:

FWIW, I remind you all that Janest' blog is aggregated, together with
many other OCaml-related blog, on the OCaml Planet, available at
<http://planet.ocamlcore.org> .
			
========================================================================
2) Syntax highlighting and Ocaml/PHP integration
Archive: <http://groups.google.com/group/fa.caml/browse_thread/thread/4102101b6120cca5# 
 >
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** Dario Teixeira asked:

I'm looking for a GPL-compatible syntax highlighting library with  
support
for most common programming languages and markups.  Obviously I would
prefer a native Ocaml library, though something in C would also be
acceptable due the relative ease of writing bindings.

One library that looks competent is GeSHi [1].  Unfortunately it is
written in PHP.  However, for lack of alternatives, I am looking into
ways of integrating GeSHi with Ocaml.

I reckon that a shell invocation of PHP is straightforward, but I bet
that it would entail a huge performance penalty due to the startup time.
Therefore, I am looking into somehow integrating the PHP interpreter
within the main Ocaml programme.  Something like Apache's mod_php.
Does anyone have any experience with this?  (Note that I have *zero*
experience with PHP).

If all else fails, my backup solution is simply to run a small webserver
with GeSHi and transform the library call into a web service.  Though I
would rather avoid this convoluted option.

Thanks in advance for your input!
Best regards,
Dario Teixeira

P.S.  Another (possibly far-fetched) solution is to take advantage of  
the
       syntax highlighting capabilities of Vim or Emacs.  Something  
along
       the lines of embedding or remotely invoking one of these editors,
       with the sole purpose of asking them to highlight a text file.
       Is this even possible?

[1] <http://qbnz.com/highlighter/>
			
** Dave Benjamin suggested:

I have had decent results opening a pipe to GNU source-highlight. I'm
mainly using it on JSON, so I can't vouch for its support of other
languages but it seems pretty comprehensive.
let pipe program input =

    let (in_channel, out_channel) = Unix.open_process program in
    output_string out_channel input;
    close_out out_channel;
    let result = ref [] in
    begin
      try
        while true do
          result := input_line in_channel :: !result
        done
      with End_of_file -> ()
    end;
    ignore (Unix.close_process (in_channel, out_channel));
    String.concat "\n" (List.rev !result)

let pre_body = Pcre.regexp ~flags:[`DOTALL] ".*<pre>(.*)</pre>.*"

let source_highlight lang code =
    let result = pipe ("source-highlight -s " ^ lang) code in
    Pcre.replace ~rex:pre_body ~templ:"$1" result

Caveat: The "pipe" function above will block on large inputs due to
buffering deadlock. It should probably be rewritten using Unix.select.
			
** Martin Jambon also suggested:

I've used vim a little bit for my static webpages, here's the result:
<http://martin.jambon.free.fr/hello.c.html>
<http://martin.jambon.free.fr/quine.sh.html>
<http://martin.jambon.free.fr/micmatch/Makefile.html>
The script is:
#!/bin/sh -e
# Usage : any2html <file1> [<file2> ...]
# Requires : vim
[ $# -lt 1 ] && echo "Usage : $0 <fic1> <fic2> ..." && exit 1
while [ -n "$1" ]
do
      file=`basename "$1"`
      cp -f "$1" /tmp
      vim -f +"syn on" +"so \\\$VIMRUNTIME/syntax/2html.vim" +"wq"  
+"q" /tmp/"$file"
      cp -f /tmp/"$file".html "$1".html
      shift
done
			
** Adrien Nader suggested:

You might try Highlight[1] and Caml2html[2]. I know I've tried
Highlight but I simply can't remember how the result looked like, most
probably because I needed to write to a tex file (I still don't know
if there's anything with color support). Caml2html generates nice
pages but only supports the ocaml language, it's written in ocaml
however.

OK, tried hightlight again... Its output is less colorized than vim's
but still alright and this can be changed. It's GPLv2. The drawback is
that it's written in C++ so probably not the best solution if you want
to hack it. (* I've been going through (p)7zip to write bindings, why
does C++ have to be that horrible ? *) The code might be perfectly
understandable though, I've not looked at it.


[1] <http://www.andre-simon.de/doku/highlight/highlight.html>
[2] <http://martin.jambon.free.fr/caml2html.html>
			
========================================================================
Using folding to read the cwn in vim 6+
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Here is a quick trick to help you read this CWN if you are viewing it  
using
vim (version 6 or greater).

:set foldmethod=expr
:set foldexpr=getline(v:lnum)=~'^=\\{78}$'?'<1':1
zM
If you know of a better way, please let me know.

========================================================================
Old cwn
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========================================================================


-- 
Alan Schmitt <http://alan.petitepomme.net/>

The hacker: someone who figured things out and made something cool  
happen.
  .O.
  ..O
  OOO


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