4 ms·

I'm pretty sure that the JetBrains products (Intellij, PyCharm, etc.) have a pretty deep understanding of the languages they handle. Java is strongly typed, and

I'm pretty sure that the JetBrains products (Intellij, PyCharm, etc.) have a pretty deep understanding of the languages they handle. Java is strongly typed, and Intellij does a perfect job, (as far as I can tell), of highlighting, and more importantly, refactoring. Hard to see how they could do that with just regex matching. By contrast, Python is more dynamic, and so the refactoring in PyCharm is pretty weak. It usually catches some of what it needs, but I often need to find the rest. It does appear to be the case that PyCharm is doing flow analysis to infer types. I.e., even PyCharm is doing more than regex matching.

tom_mellior 6y ago
> highlighting, and more importantly, refactoring. Hard to see how they could do that with just regex matching. The former is easy, the latter is impossible with regexes only. Which tells you that they are very different things. For refactoring you need not only a proper parse, but also the ability to "look things up in symbol tables". Which is what I said: There are good reasons to run a proper language frontend from the IDE. But syntax highlighting isn't one of these reasons. And refactoring isn't possible with only a simple parse without using symbol tables.