I agree that syntax highlighting is not critical, but TFA mentions 2 cases where syntax highlighting might help: in the middle of long comment blocks (you don't

I agree that syntax highlighting is not critical, but TFA mentions 2 cases where syntax highlighting might help: in the middle of long comment blocks (you don't want to be reading commented-out code and thinking it's active), and the difference between "=" and "==". I would add a third, which I run into more frequently than either of those two: Syntax highlighting helps in finding unterminated strings or regexes (why yes, I do write a lot of Perl). If you forget to terminate a string or a regex, a load of the rest of the file turns into string or regex colour, so it's easy to find where you made the mistake.