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-rw-r--r--README13
1 files changed, 13 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/README b/README
index 28df55d..bfafa2c 100644
--- a/README
+++ b/README
@@ -73,6 +73,19 @@ converted to HTML (via SXML) or any other format for rendering.
highlighter is used to deal with text that doesn't match any
recognized syntax and simply produces an untagged string.
+ Most syntax highlighters use lots of regular expressions to do their
+ magic, but guile-syntax-highlight uses a purely functional, monadic
+ parser combinator interface instead. This makes it easy for
+ developers to build complex parsers by creating compositions of many
+ simpler ones. Additionally, rather than working with raw strings or
+ Guile's file ports, the input code is represented as a lazy stream
+ of characters using the SRFI-41 streams library. By using streams,
+ parsers do not have to worry about things like reverting the
+ character index from which a file is being read upon a failure, or
+ any other state management. Parsers simply return the thing they
+ parsed, if any, and the remaining stream to be consumed by another
+ parser.
+
* Requirements
- GNU Guile >= 2.0.9