vim-shen

Syntax highlighting plugin for http://shenlanguage.org. Mainly made for and tested on vim version 8. Work in progress.

Installation

For example with [Vundle.vim] (https://github.com/VundleVim/Vundle.vim):

Plugin 'nimaai/vim-shen'

or with no specific plugin manager installed by placing the files in their respective locations.

Syntax highlighting

All the keywords defined in [Shen's system functions] (http://www.shenlanguage.org/learn-shen/system.pdf#system-functions) are highlighted, as well as if, let, cases and Shen-YACC's defcc and compile.

Apart from that, syntax highlighting primarily focusses on tokens and grammar special to Shen. Number, Strings, etc. are currently not highlighted, but the following are:

• function definition: ->, <-, where
• all function and local variables which begin with uppercase character
• list construction operator: |
• Shen-YACC: :=, ;, <!>, <e>, <end> and all user defined <.*>
• more to come, like data type definitions, etc.

The motivation for this choice is rather personal with regards to being able to learn Shen faster and write it in a convenient manner. Syntax highlighting will most probably change in future to lean on the [grammar definition of Shen] (http://shenlanguage.org/learn-shen/index.html#12%20The%20Syntax%20of%20Shen) in a stricter manner.

Indentation

Lisp typical indentation for let, if and do has been disabled. Thus, they indent like any other function call:

(let Var1 1
     Var2 2
     (+ Var1 Var2))

(if test
    true
    false)

Known problems

Tuple, string and vector constructors @p, @s, @v do not highlight as they should. I suspect that @ character has a special meaning in regards to the vimscript syntax...

Recommendations

• [Paredit] (https://github.com/kovisoft/paredit) has support for Shen.
• [Vim-Slime] (https://github.com/jpalardy/vim-slime) for interactive development Vim + REPL.

Thanks

[Mark Tarver] (http://marktarver.com/) (creator of Shen)