Yeah, his choice of block comment code is a little strange. Since much of Hugo's design is, um, [i]inspired[/i] by Inform 6, he probably got the exclamation-mark-as-comment from there and made up his own multi-line version.

Also, TADS has kind of always been known as the "IF system for C programmers" (which DOES use C-style comment blocks) so he might have been trying to keep away from that.

Anyhow, you can find a list of editors that handle Hugo's block comments correctly here: http://hugo.gerynarsabode.org/index.php?title=Supported_Editors

(I'm sure there are more out there)

Yeah, I agree, the game language steals so much from C that he should have just stolen /* and */ as block comments.

Not so sure, because this let's gedit also highlight special characters in strings (\n, \B, etc...) I'm thinking (and I could totally be wrong) that at least as far as gedit is concerned, it sees the !, looks through the definitions and says "ah, line comment"

[quote="Gerynar"]I blame the designer of the language. I mean honestly, who uses backslashes in code besides to designate a special character.[/quote]
Maybe that [i]is[/i] the problem. The backslash is also defined as the escape character, and the text editors can't manage to interpret both functions.

I blame the designer of the language. I mean honestly, who uses backslashes in code besides to designate a special character.

:)

We're filling in the gaps in this under-represented authoring system. It's good to know that Linux and Windows users now have a couple choices of text editors to use for work on Hugo games. Even if the editors stubbornly refuse to recognize our block comments. ;-)

OK, for the one or two other people who develop Hugo games in Linux, I've got a syntax highlight definition file. It's for gedit. Just copy the file to the gtksourceview-2.0 directory. (Usually located at /usr/share/gtksourceview-2.0/language-specs).

(Fixed multi-line comments)

[url]http://gerynarsabode.org/index.php?option=com_jdownloads&Itemid=3&task=view.download&catid=3&cid=6[/url]