Forums : Suggestions for Ohloh 2.0
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Custom Programming Languages
On these forums, I occasionally see requests for new programming languages to be supported. Since most languages (with a few exceptions) follow a similar pattern for comments, would it be possible to allow Ohloh to track user-defined programming languages?
A user can input the following information about a specific language -- the following would be for C90:
File extensions: c, h
Start of single line comment: none
Start of multi-line comment: /*
End of multi-line comment: */
Of course, it won't be perfect (some languages share extensions -- such as C and C++) and this won't work for ALL of the programming languages (like the older versions of Fortran) but it should cover the vast majority of languages today.
The problem that this would probably have is that the options can't be screwed around with very often or else there would be problems in the scanning of the code. One option (and the only one I can think of) would be to have an approval system for changes. Users can request new languages but only the administrators can add/approve them and add them to projects that need to be rescanned.
I believe that something like this is necessary because there are potentially thousands of programming languages out there. Tons of these obscure languages are probably being used by many of the open source projects here. For example, a lot of projects on Ohloh are programming languages themselves (and probably have parts written in themselves). In my opinion, it seems unnecessary to add a completely new language used by only two or three projects to the full list of programming languages. Yet, without the information on those languages, some project statistics might be way off.
