How to write an emacs mode for a new language?

Question

I would like to write an Emacs major mode for a 4GL. Can someone show me a tutorial? As far as I googled I was able to find only this broken:

link http://two-wugs.net/emacs/mode-tutorial.html

Grackle

What would be really nice would be to have a language mode generator from a syntax specification written in BNFC. Is there any work in this area? – Desilva

Answer 1

If you're lazy, one easy way is to extend generic-mode to know about your new language:

http://emacswiki.org/emacs/GenericMode

I do this a lot for config files for applications that I work with a lot to get decent syntax highlighting. Here's one I did for the asterisk PBX a long time ago as an example.

Specs