Adding magma as a new language

[roed314]

Magma is a computer algebra system that is widely used by research mathematicians in number theory, group theory and other parts of algebra. The conventional file extension is .m, which conflicts with many other languages, and leads to misclassification (unsurprisingly, since it's not currently in linguist). I was curious about how difficult it would be to add, and had a few questions about doing so.

• Your documentation suggests 200 repos as a threshold for a language being widespread. With a file extension like .m, how can I check for that condition being satisfied?
• The language is closed source, and I don't know of an existing grammar. Is a grammar a requirement for adding a language? I assume that writing a grammar is not trivial, but can you point me at documentation for creating one?

Thanks!

[lildude]

Your documentation suggests 200 repos as a threshold for a language being widespread. With a file extension like .m, how can I check for that condition being satisfied?

We use the standard GitHub search and more relaxed requirements at the moment.

The language is closed source, and I don't know of an existing grammar. Is a grammar a requirement for adding a language? I assume that writing a grammar is not trivial, but can you point me at documentation for creating one?

A grammar isn't a requirement but it kinda defeats the point adding support without one as most people only want support so they get syntax highlighting. We want a standard TextMate compatible grammar so any of the many TextMate grammar docs you can find with a simple search should get you on the right path.

As for the conflicts… this can be resolved with a heuristic which is just a regex that identifies something unique to the language, ideally within the first few lines of the file.

[roed314]

Thanks!