> 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 w

> 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.