Separate highlighting of method and local variable about vim-ruby HOT 8 CLOSED

Method calls and local variable references do have the same syntax in Ruby -- at least in general. So the highlighter does have no option to distinguish the two cases reliably (unless 'self' is used to give methods an explicit receiver, or '()' are always used for method calls, which is non-idiomatic Ruby).

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That's mostly what I figured, but I was wondering if vim could maybe look in the definition for the method or block a line is being written in, and find the variable names from there, and use that from coloring. I'm guessing though that vim does everything just per line?

from vim-ruby.

What you suggest amounts to actually parsing part of the buffer to augment the highlight information. If I'm not mistaken this is well beyond the possibilities of the Vim highlighter, which is purely syntax based. It would also make highlighting more expensive.

To have an actual parser help with highlighting would be a good thing, though. I don't know if it's possible to use an (external) parser to help with syntax highlighting from within Vim. Just having different colors for local variables vs. methods would probably not be worth the effort required. However, with a parser helping it would be possible to mark faulty Ruby code, and that's nice.

Maybe take a look at what 'eclim' does, that's a Vim script which communicates with the Eclipse IDE running in the background, to have advanced content sensitive features when editing Java code.

from vim-ruby.

Yes, this is effectively impossible with Vim's regex based highlighting.

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Noo need to look up the method name, the way you distinguish method calls and variables is much simpler!

def foo_is_variable
  foo = 'we assign value'
  foo #foo is variable
end

def foo_is_method
  foo #here, foo wasn't assigned any value -> it is a method call
end

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@hakunin to be clear, that doesn't make it any more possible.

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@tpope so there is no state where it could store the vars in local scope?

I saw that vim knows, if I write one 'end' too many and it doesn't highlight it. Is that done through some kind of state?

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Vim highlighting has a concept known as a "region" which is basically a pair of start and end regexes. And it allows you to nest them.

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