libIDL README

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Introduction

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libIDL is a library licensed under the GNU LGPL for creating trees of

CORBA Interface Definition Language (IDL) files, which is a

specification for defining portable interfaces.  libIDL was initially

written for ORBit (the ORB from the GNOME project, and the primary

means of libIDL distribution).  However, the functionality was

designed to be as reusable and portable as possible.

It is written in C, and the aim is to retain the ability to compile it

on a system with a standard C compiler.  Preprocessed parser files are

included so you are not forced to rebuild the parser, however an

effort is made to keep the parser and lexer compatible with standard

Unix yacc.  Currently, flex is required to generate the lexical

scanner.

With libIDL, you can parse an IDL file which will be automatically run

through the C preprocessor (on systems with one available), and have

detailed error and warning messages displayed.  On a compilation

without errors, the tree is returned to the custom application.

libIDL performs compilation phases from lexical analysis to nearly

full semantic analysis with some optimizations, and will attempt to

generate meaningful errors and warnings for invalid or deprecated IDL.

libIDL exports functionality used to generate detailed conforming

error and warning messages in gcc-like format, and also comes with a

default backend to generate IDL into a file or string (useful for

customized messages or comments in the output).  The IDL backend is

complete enough that most generated IDL can be reparsed by libIDL

without errors. libIDL returns separate syntax and namespace trees,

and includes functionality to hide syntactical information from the

primary tree, while keeping it accessible through the namespace for

type information and name lookup.

Optional extensions to standard IDL can be enabled using parse flags.

These include node properties, embedded code fragments, and XPIDL.

Nodes can also have declarations tags which assign particular

attributions to certain IDL constructs to further facilitate custom

applications.

If you are upgrading to a new version, please see the NEWS file for

any changes which may affect code.

Emacs Syntax Highlighting for IDL Code

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

If you are using Emacs 20.x and do not have decent syntax highlighting

in your IDL mode, you can use the following Emacs lisp to add

IDL-specific highlighting using font-lock mode:

(font-lock-add-keywords

 'idl-mode

 `(("^#[ 	]*error[ 	]+\\(.+\\)" 1 'font-lock-warning-face prepend)

   ("^#[ 	]*\\(include\\)[ 	]+\\(<[^>\"\n]*>?\\)" 2 'font-lock-string-face)

   ("^#[ 	]*define[ 	]+\\(\\sw+\\)(" 1 'font-lock-function-name-face)

   ("^#[ 	]*\\(elif\\|if\\)\\>"

    ("\\<\\(defined\\)\\>[ 	]*(?\\(\\sw+\\)?" nil nil

     (1 'font-lock-reference-face)

     (2 'font-lock-variable-name-face nil t)))

   ("\\(__declspec\\)[ 	]*(\\([^)]+\\))"

    (1 'font-lock-reference-face)

    (2 'font-lock-variable-name-face))

   ("^#[ 	]*\\(\\sw+\\)\\>[ 	]*\\(\\sw+\\)?"

    (1 'font-lock-reference-face)

    (2 'font-lock-variable-name-face nil t))

   ("\\<\\(raises\\)\\>" 1 'font-lock-keyword-face)

   ("[ 	]*\\([A-Za-z][A-Za-z0-9_]*\\)[ 	]*(" 1 'font-lock-function-name-face)

   ("\\<\\(any\\|boolean\\|char\\|const\\|double\\|enum\\|fixed\\|float\\|interface\\|long\\|module\\|native\\|octet\\|Object\\|sequence\\|short\\|string\\|struct\\|unsigned\\|union\\|void\\|wchar\\|wstring\\)\\>" 1 'font-lock-type-face)

   ("\\<\\(attribute\\|case\\|context\\|default\\|exception\\|FALSE\\|in\\|inout\\|oneway\\|out\\|readonly\\|switch\\|TRUE\\|typedef\\)\\>" 1 'font-lock-keyword-face)) 'set)

(add-hook 'idl-mode-hook '(lambda () (font-lock-mode 1)))