In a thread posted about a month and a half ago asking if VisualD could support type highlighting it was said that it "should be possible", although many false classifications would be expected.

I would really appreciate if something like this could be added as an option even with false classifications, highlighting really helps me navigate code much quicker.

While I realize Mono-D can do this to some extent too, I already use and am comfortable with Visual Studio writing C++ and C#, and would love to be able to feel as comfortable in it using D.

On Sunday, 21 August 2016 at 04:00:09 UTC, BearishMushroom wrote:
> 

When you say 'type-highlighting', do you mean the highlighting of user-defined types?

It would certainly be difficult because anywhere you have
alias foo = x;
foo could be a type, a function, an expression, a template…

But nevertheless I suspect it's not impossible to do this with great accuracy.

On Sunday, 21 August 2016 at 07:39:10 UTC, Cauterite wrote:
> On Sunday, 21 August 2016 at 04:00:09 UTC, BearishMushroom wrote:
>> 
>
> When you say 'type-highlighting', do you mean the highlighting of user-defined types?
>
> It would certainly be difficult because anywhere you have
> alias foo = x;
> foo could be a type, a function, an expression, a template…
>
> But nevertheless I suspect it's not impossible to do this with great accuracy.

Highlighting is often based on a simplified lexer. To highlight accurately a type a bit of parsing is necessary.

But this topic gives me the idea of "phobos style" type highlighting which could work without parsing, e.g when an identifier is found, it's either a keyword, if the first letter is upper case than it's a type otherwise a user identifier. I think I'm gonna try this in Coedit. It should be easy to add the Visual D too.