Looking for suggestions in editing FPro files

[Fairlight]

>From inside the gravity well of a singularity, Boaz Bezborodko shouted:
> 
> Not enough to justify your writing the program just for me.  I normally 
> don't do a lot of programming, but the last few months have been a bit 
> different as we started to do a lot of new business that requires new 
> programs and modifications.

Fair enough answer.

> But I can see spending something like $100 or $200 for something that 
> makes the programming easier.  If it could color code variables, 
> highlight key commands or selected strings like Notepad++ can do then 
> that can be even better.

That's the difference between mass-market, high-sales-volume canned
applications, and custom-written software that is written on-demand, or may
sell up to a whopping 5-20 times over several years.  High volume equals
low price point.  Low volume equals development cost or slightly under.
That's just reality.

This isn't a personal comment at you.  Some people/places get this,
and you very well might already.  For some companies, it's worth it to
them to dump a few grand on something like this, or similar projects.
Been there, done that more than a few times, have another requested one
that's in the production pipeline, actually.  But for the edification
of those that think that this stuff can and should just materialise out
of nowhere at really beautiful price points (or worse, free) and get
sticker shock, you know...you have to look at a cost:time management
standpoint of the developer.  One can spend 2hrs adminning a system
fixing something and that's $200.  $200 wouldn't pay more than a tiny
fraction of writing something custom like I detailed, much less the whole
cost of the program.  More like 50-100hrs would be required, and that's
with a jump-off project to rip code from.  Add another 52hrs if you had to
start from scratch, as that's what the weapon editor took--and that was
jumped off of two other projects, which was another 65hrs and 45hrs
respectively.

So from that standpoint of, "If I used my time to do 'x', I'd be able
to bring in 'y'," you can't afford to just "throw away" your time as a
businessperson by doing something on the cheap when it won't move, as
opposed to what you could be doing in terms of raw billable to make ends
meet.  At least not unless you have significant downtime on billable
anyway, in which case -maybe- it pans out.  But I've already got a
several-month-long project to finish that will eat up that type of
downtime/off-hours as part of a long-term business plan.

As I said, not directed at you.  More a general education thing for the
masses.  Because people blink and go catatonic when you start whipping out
numbers--even when they're entirely accurate or even conservative.  People
really do seem to confuse shrink-wrap and custom price points, and think
you're making this stuff up out of nowhere.

> (Notepad++ has the ability to use plugins, but I that is way past my 
> programming knowledge.)

Might be a simpler way to go, and this advice comes free:

Grab GVim from vim.org.  It's essentially a graphical vim, which is an
enhanced vi.  But...what I'd do is look at using vim and just writing
a syntax highlighting profile for filePro.  Profiles exist for enough other
languages that it -should- be possible to write one for fP code.  In terms
of figuring out contextual stuff, a look at maybe the perl syntax profile
might help in terms of semantically differentiating an operator 'eq' from a
dummy variable 'eq'.

So the editing framework is there, vim's graphical version can be resized,
and "all" you'd need to do is write the syntax highlight rules.  Might be
an on-the-cheap way to go about it.  Not ideal, but sounds like it's fairly
practical middle ground.

mark->
-- 
Audio panton, cogito singularis,