Introduction

Syntax schemes language (SSL) is a script language which describes text parsing process to produce syntax highlighting. It is XML-based language with its own XML vocabulary and structure. Syntax schemes language is designed to make the process of describing structures of programming languages most flexible and efficient.

Syntax schemes language uses Regular Expressions to achieve flexible recognition of text elements, lexems and tokens. Still Regular Expressions (RE) are able to recognize only a limited set of syntax constructions when it is often necessary to describe more complex structures. Therefore SSL uses special construct named "scheme" to define behaviour of more powerful recursive set of languages (context free). Such schemes in combination with RE make SSL strong declarative language.

Syntax scheme documents are contained in TLMDEditDocument.SyntaxSchemes collection.