#89 NEdit hangs when editing .nedit

[Roland Lammel]

When starting nedit with .nedit (nedit .nedit) without
disabling the language mode, nedit loads the file, but
hangs afterwards.

When starting without syntax highlighting (nedit -lm
none .nedit) everything works fine.

There seems to be a problem in the highlighting
patterns.

That happend after upgrading NEdit to 5.2 (from 5.1) on
HP-UX 10.20 and saving defaults (which were of version
5.1 first, where the problem did not occur)

[Roland Lammel]

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Might be related to bug #477516 (infinite loop in Syntax
highlighting)

[Eddy De Greef]

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Can you please attach the .nedit file that
is causing the problem ?
Without it, it's nearly impossible to track
this down.
Thanks.

(Yes, it's probably the same problem as #477516,
that's why I would really like to be able to
reproduce it.)

[Scott Tringali]

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Please attach .nedit file or confirm fix in 5.2. Otherwise,
we'll close it.

[Roland Lammel]

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Sorry, haven't got the notification on Nov-13, I'll attach
the file tomorrow at work.

[Roland Lammel]

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Verified the problem, it still exists.
Reproduceable every time by starting
> nedit .nedit

Attaching .nedti file

[Roland Lammel]

Nedit configfile .nedit

[Eddy De Greef]

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Thanks, it's indeed reproducable.

But NEdit does not really hang. If you are
patient enough, it will finish the highlighting.
(On a "slow" HPUX 10 workstation, it takes +/- 1.5 minutes;
on a simple 866MHz Pentium III it takes only 7 seconds).

The highlighting code was heavily modified in 5.2,
and in general performs much better, but unfortunately
there are now some pathological cases where highlight
patterns can be very inefficient on certain inputs.

Especially patterns with line continuations seem to
be sensitive to this problem when the file contains
very long continued lines.

So this is not a functional bug, but a performance bug.

I will try to find out what exactly is going on and
whether we can improve performance, but I won't give
it a high priority.

You can work around the problem by disabling highlighting
for your .nedit file: Default Settings->Language Modes->
X Resources -> remove .nedit from the list of file
extensions.

(So it isn't related to #477516 :-( )

[Alexander Mai]

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Adjust priority and assign

[Eddy De Greef]

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The X-resource patterns seemed to be the culprit. See:

http://www.nedit.org/archives/develop/2001-Dec/0049.html
http://www.nedit.org/archives/develop/2001-Dec/0055.html

So I don't intend to change anything in the highlighting
routines (too risky).

If nobody objects, I'll update the patterns in CVS with
those provided by Markus.

[Eddy De Greef]

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I've updated the patterns in CVS.
Highlight times on the "slow" HPUX10 machine
have been reduced to +/- 3 seconds.