Question

The mathematica.SE is currently in private beta and will open to the public in a few days. Stack Overflow and related sites use prettify.js, however Mathematica is not a supported language. It would be pretty awesome to have a custom highlighting script for our site, and I request the JavaScript and CSS community’s help in developing a such a script and the accompanying CSS.

I’ve listed below a few basic requirements such that it captures most of the features of Mathematica’s default highlighting scheme (ignoring stuff that only the internal parser would know). I’ve also named the colours generically – hexadecimal colour codes can be picked from the screenshots I’ve provided (further below). I’ve also added code samples to accompany the screenshots so that folks can test it out.

Basic requirements

1. Comments
   These are entered as (* comment *). So anything between these should be highlighted in gray.

2. Strings
   These are entered as "string"(single quotes are not supported), and should be highlighted in pink.

3. Operators/short hand notations
   Apart from the standard +, -, *, /, ^, ==, etc., Mathematica has several other operators and short hand notations. The most commonly encountered ones are:

   @, @@, @@@, /@, //@, //, ~, /., //., ->, :>, /:, /;, :=, :^=, =., 
   &, |, ||, &&, _, __, ___, ;;, [[, ]], <<, >>, ~~, <>
   

   These, and parenthesis, brackets and braces should all be highlighted in black.

4. Patterns objects and slots
   Pattern objects start with a letter and have either _ or __ or ___ attached, like for example, x_, x__ and x___. These can also have additional letters following the underscore, as x_abc, etc. All of these should be highlighted in green.

   Slots are # and ## and can also be followed by an integer as #1, ##4, etc., and should also be in green.

   Both of these (pattern objects and slots) are usually terminated by an operator/bracket/shortform from point 3 above.

5. Functions/variables
   Functions and variables is a rather loose terminology here, but serves for the purposes of this post. Anything not falling in the above 4 can be highlighted in black. Mathematica often uses backticks ` in code and should be considered part of the function/variable name. E.g., abcd`defg. Dollar signs $ anywhere in a variable name is to be treated just like a letter (i.e., nothing special).

For all of the above, if they appear inside strings, they should be treated as such, i.e. "@~# should be highlighted in pink.

Additional nice to haves:

1. In the pattern objects in point 3 above, if the underscore(s) is followed by a ? and then some letters, then the part following the _ should be in black. E.g., in x__?abc, the x__ part must be in green and the ?abc in black.
2. if a function/variable starts with a capital letter, then it is highlighted in black. If it starts with a small letter, it is highlighted in blue. Internally, this differentiates built-in functions vs. user defined functions. However, the mathematica community (pretty much everywhere) sticks to this naming convention fairly well, so distinguishing the two would serve some purpose.

Screenshots & code samples:

1. Simple examples

Here’s a small example set, with a screenshot at the end showing how it looks in Mathematica:

(*simple pattern objects & operators*)
f[x_, y__] := x Times @@ y  

(*pattern objects with chars at the end and strings*)

f[x_String] := x <> "hello@world" 

(*pattern objects with ?xxx at the end*)

f[x_?MatrixQ] := x + Transpose@x

<< Combinatorica` (*example with backticks and inline comment*)

(*Slightly more complicated example with a mix of stuff*)

Developer`PartitionMap[Total, Range@1000, 3][[3 ;; -3]]~Partition~2 //
  Times @@@ # &

2. A real world example

Here’s an example from this answer of mine that also indicates my point 2 in the “Additional nice to haves” section, i.e., lowercase stuff being highlighted in blue.

Also, you might notice some of the variables highlighted in orange – I purposefully didn’t include that as a requirement, as I think that’s going to be a lot harder to do without a parser that knows Mathematica.

prob = MapIndexed[#1/#2 &, 
    Accumulate[
     EuclideanDistance[{0, 0}, #] < 1 & /@ arrows // Boole]]~N~4;

Manipulate[
 Graphics[{White, Rectangle[{-5, -5}, {5, 5}], Red, Disk[{0, 0}, 1], 
   Black, Point[arrows[[;; i]]], 
   Text[Style[First@prob[[i]], Bold, 18, "Helvetica"], {-4.5, 4.5}]}, 
  ImageSize -> 200], {i, Range[2, 20000, 1]}, 
 ControlType -> Manipulator, SaveDefinitions -> True]

Is this feasible? Too much? Too hard? Impossible?

Quite frankly, I don’t know the answer to any of those. I just listed some basic features that everyone on mathematica.SE would love to have and some additional stuff that would be a cherry on the top. However, do let me know if these are too difficult to implement. We can work out a smaller subset of features.

In recognition of this help, you all have the Mathematica community’s eternal gratitude and in addition, I’ll award a 500 bounty to each person that contributes significantly to this (if it’s done in parts by different folks) – I’ll rely on your votes/comments/output on the answers to decide what’s significant (perhaps more than one bounty to one person if they do all the work). Implementing the “Additional nice to haves” gets an automatic +500 regardless of previous bounties, so you can also build upon the work of others even if you don’t do the first half. I might also periodically place smaller bounties to attract users who might not have seen this question, so if you happen to earn those bounties, they’ll be in addition to the “bounty to reward an existing answer” which will be decided towards the end.

Lastly, I’m not in a hurry. So please take your time with this question. The bounty is always an option until it is implemented by SE (or if it has been determined that existing answers satisfy the requirements completely). Ideally, I’m hoping to get this implemented 2/3rs of our way into the beta, which is 2 months from now.

Answer 1

Preface

Since the Mathematica support for google-code-prettify was mainly developed for the new Mathematica.Stackexchange site, please see also the discussion here.

Introduction

I have no deep knowledge of all of this, but there were times when I wrote a cweb plugin for Idea to have my code highlighted there. In an IDE all this is not a one step process. It is divided into several steps and each step has more highlighting-abilities. Let me explain this a bit to give later some reasons why some things are (imho) not possible for a code-highlighter we need here.

At first the code is split into tokens which are the single parts of a programming language. After this lexer you can categorize intervals of your code into e.g. whitespace, literal, string, comment, and so on. This lexer eats the source-code by testing regular expressions, storing the token-type for a text-span and stepping forward in the code.

After this lexical scan the source-code can be parsed by using the rules of the programming language, the tokens and the underlying code. For instance, if we have a token Plus which is of type Keyword then we know that the brackets and the parameter should follow. If not, the syntax is not correct. What you can build with this parsing is called an AST, abstract syntax tree, and looks basically like the TreeForm of Mathematica syntax.

With a nicely designed language, like Java for instance, it is possible to the check the code while typing and make it almost impossible to write syntactically wrong code.

prettify.js and Mathematica Code

First, the prettify.js implements only a lexical scanner, but no parser. I’m pretty sure, that this would be impossible anyway regarding the time-constrains for displaying a web-page. So let me explain what features are not possible/feasible with prettify.js:

Also, you might notice some of the variables highlighted in orange – I
purposefully didn’t include that as a requirement, as I think that’s
going to be a lot harder to do without a parser that knows
Mathematica.

Right, because the highlighting of these variables depends on the context. You have to know, that you are inside a Table construct or something like that.

Hacking prettify.js

I think hacking an extension for prettify.js is not so hard. I’m an absolute regular expression noob, so be prepared of what follows.

We don’t need so much stuff for a simple Mathematica lexer.
We have whitespace, comments, string-literals, braces, a lot of operators, usual literals like variables and a giant list of keywords.

Lets start, with the keywords in java-script regexp-form:

Export["google-code-prettify/keywordsmma.txt", 
   StringJoin @@ Riffle[Apply[StringJoin, 
         Partition[Riffle[Names[RegularExpression["[A-Z].*"]], 
             "|"], 100], {1}], "'+ \n '"], "TEXT"]

The regular expression for whitespace and string-literals can be copied from another language. Comments are matched by something like

/^\(\*[\s\S]*?\*\)/

This runs wrong if we have comments inside comments, but for the moment I don’t care. We have braces and brackets

/^(?:\[|\]|{|}|\(|\))/

We have something like blub_boing which should be matched separately.

/^[a-zA-Z$]+[a-zA-Z0-9$]*_+([a-zA-Z$]+[a-zA-Z0-9$]*)*/

We have the slots #, ##, #1, ##9 (currently only one digit can follow)

/^#+[0-9]?/

We have variable names and other literals. They need to start with either a letter or $ and then can follow letters, numbers and $. Currently \[Gamma] is not matched as one literal but for the moment it’s ok.

/^[a-zA-Z$]+[a-zA-Z0-9$]*/

And we have operators (I’m not sure this list is complete).

/^(?:\+|\-|\*|\/|,|;|\.|:|@|~|=|\>|\<|&|\||_|`|\^)/

Update

I cleaned the stuff a bit up, did some debugging and created a color-style which looks beautiful to me. The following stuff works as far as I can see correctly:

• All system symbols which can be found through Names[RegularExpression["[A-Z].*"]] are matched and highlighted in blue
• Braces and brackets are black but bold font-weight. This was an suggestion from Szabolcs and I like it very much since it definitely add some energy to the appearance of the code
• Patterns, as they appear in function definitions and the slots of pure functions are highlighted in green. This was suggested by Yoda and goes along with the highlighter in the Mathematica frontend. Patterns are only green in combination with a variable like in blub__Integer, a1_ or in b34_Integer32. Testfunctions for the pattern like in num_?NumericQ are only green infront of the question mark.
• Comments and Strings have the same color. Comments and strings can go over several lines. Strings can include backslashed quotes. Comments cannot be nested.
• For the coloring I used consistently the ColorData[1] scheme to ensure colors look nice side by side.

Currently it looks like that:

Testing and debugging

Szabolcs asked whether and how it is possible to test this. This is easy: You need my google-code-prettify source (Where can I put this, so that everyone has access?). Unpack the sources and open the file tests/mathematica_test.html in a webbrowser. This file loads by itself the files src/prettify.js, src/lang-mma.js and src/prettify-mma-1.css.

• in lang-mma.js you find the regular expression the lexer is using when splitting the code into tokens.
• in prettify-mma-1.css you find the style definitions I use

To test your own code, simply open mathematica_test.html in an editor and paste your stuff between the pre tags. Reload the page and your code should appear.

Debugging: If the highlighter is not working correctly, you can debug with an IDE or with Google-Chrome. In Chrome you mark the word where the highlighter starts to fail and make right-klick and Inspect Element. What you see then is the underlying html-highlight code. There you can see every single token and you see which type the token is. This looks then like

<span class="tag">[</span>

You see the open bracket is of type tag. This matches with the regexp definition I made in lang-mma.js. In Chrome it is even possible to browse the JS code, set breakpoints and debug it while reloading your page.

---

Local installation for Google Chrome and Firefox

Tim Stone was so kind to write a script which injects the highlighter during the loading of sites under http://stackoverflow.com/questions/. As soon as google-code-prettify is turned on for mathematica.stackexchange.com it should work there too.
I adapted this script to use my lexical scanning rules and colors. I heard that in Firefox the script is not always working, but this is how to install it:

• Chrome: Follow this link https://github.com/halirutan/Mathematica-Source-Highlighting/raw/master/mathematica-source-highlighter.user.js and you should be prompted whether you want to install this extension.
• Firefox: ensure you have the Greasemonkey plugin installed. Then download the same link as for Chrome.
• Now you are set up and when you reload this page, comments, kernel-functions, strings and patterns should be highlighted correctly.

Versions

Under https://github.com/halirutan/Mathematica-Source-Highlighting/raw/master/mathematica-source-highlighter.user.js you will always find the most recent version. Here is some change history.
  – 02/23/2013 Updated the lists of symbols and keywords to Mathematica version 9.0.1
– 09/02/2012 some minor issues with the coloring of Mathematica-patterns were fixed. For a detailed overview of features with Pattern-operator : see also the discussion here

• 02/02/2012 support of many number input formats like .123`10.2 or 1.2`100.3*^-12, highlighting of In[23] and Out[4], ::usage or other messages like blub::boing, highlighting of patterns like ProblemTest[prob:(findp_[pfun_, pvars_, {popts___}, ___]), opts___], bug-fixes (I checked the parser against 3500 lines of package code from the AddOns directory. It took about 3-4 sec to run, which should be more than fast enough for our purposes.)
• 01/30/2012 Fixed missing ‘?’ in the operator list. Included named-characters like \\[Gamma] to give a complete match for such symbols. Added $variables in the keyword list. Improved the matching of patterns. Added matching of context constructions like Developer`PackedArrayQ. Switch of the color-scheme due to many requests. Now it’s like in the Mathematica-frontend. Keywords black, variables blue.
• 01/29/2012 Tim hacked to injecting code. Now the highlighting works on mathematica.stackexchange too.
• 01/25/2012 Added the recognition of Mathematica-numbers. This should now highlight things like {1, 1.0, 1., .12, 16^^1.34f, ...}. Additionally it should recognize the backtick behind a number. I switched comments and strings to gray and use a dark red for the numbers.
• 01/23/2012 Initial version. Capabilities are described under section Update.