Lexers should have human readable names

[edwardloveall]

I think it would be a good idea to have human readable names attached to each lexer. Some languages are easy to make by capitalizing the first letter (Ruby, Go, Swift, C) but it gets a little more complex with mid-word capitalization (JavaScript, XML, TeX) and even more difficult when symbols get involved (C++, Objective-C, C#).

My reasoning for this would be when a list of supported languages is available to the user, or when the detected language is displayed. These could likely be put in the lexers themselves along with the tag and file extensions.

[jneen]

Hm. Okay, that sounds reasonable. They already have the desc field, but yeah something printable would be great.

[edwardloveall]

I can go in and try to add human readable names for all of them at some point if that works for you

[jneen]

Sure, thanks!

[edwardloveall]

Looking at some of these lexers, it seems like tag is sort of for this purpose already:

Used to specify or get the canonical name of this lexer class.

But it seems in practice it's more used as a finder string, i.e. Lexer.find('foo') as opposed to a display string. Is that the intended purpose?

[jneen]

It's used for both. In particular, the tag and the aliases are what are used in markdown to specify filetype.

[jneen]

you could have a human_name thing that defaults to the tag

[edwardloveall]

I could, but they seem like different concepts. What do you think about changing the docs for tag so they say something like

Used to retrieve the lexer class

and name could be

Used as a human readable string for the lexer's language.

[jneen]

Sounds OK to me - I'd use a method other than name though, since that's already a thing on Class.

[edwardloveall]

Ah ok. Maybe title then. This language's title is "C++"

[jneen]

Sounds good.

[mpeteuil]

Looks like this is closable as a result of the work that was merged in with d627db7

[edwardloveall]

Thanks for lookin out!

[mpeteuil]

Sure thing, thanks for creating the title 😄