Writing a Pointless VS Code extension

created: 24.05.2021

I wrote a VS code extension for VS Code that adds syntax highlighting for the programming language Pointless.

Pointless is lazy, dynamically typed, purely functional language. While it has a fairly unique feature set, the syntax is very “normal”, which made it very easy to enable basic syntax highlighting.

For example, single-line comments are prefixed with --, which is a standard config that vs code supports. I simply had to put "lineComment": "--" into a .json file somewhere, and that’s enough to have shortcuts working that comment out a section of code, or uncomment things that are already comments.

In this way, trying to use common syntax in a new programming language makes it easy for existing tooling to work with your language.

If you want to learn more about Pointless, you should have a look at the official website and also this Pointless to Haskell compiler.