I know exactly what problem you are talking about. It's exactly the problem that Clang solves. With the Clang front end, you can write a tool to read C++ sour

I know exactly what problem you are talking about. It's exactly the problem that Clang solves. With the Clang front end, you can write a tool to read C++ source code and insert boilerplate at the beginning and end of each function, and it will work 100% of the time. There are dozens of such tools in active use at Google and I'm sure many other places. But it has nothing to do with context free grammars -- really. Clang uses a recursive descent parser. GCC used to use a yacc-style grammar (which BTW is only context free-ish because of semantic actions), but it could NOT perform the task you are talking about. In fact that was largely the motivation for Clang. It also doesn't really have to do with syntax highlighting as practiced by any editor or IDE I know of. Even though Clang has the power that you want ("semantic understanding"), I don't know any editor that uses it for syntax highlighting. Instead they use approximate lexical hacks. This is probably because of the need to highlight partial files and malformed files, as I mentioned. You don't want your syntax highlighting to turn off in the middle of typing a code fragment. But editors DO use Clang for semantic understanding, e.g. the YCM plugin for Vim. But they use CFGs for NEITHER problem. You're conflating two different issues and suggesting the wrong solution for both of them. There are a lot of links about this issue with regard to languages like C#, Scala, Go, JavaScript, etc. in the wiki page I linked. I agree with your general point about language design, but the terminology you're using is wrong and confusing.