Is there a way for us to syntax color our answers that we use pseudocode for. Sometimes there is just not a reason to put an answer in a particular programming language. If the question doesn't specify one, oftentimes the pseudocode is more readable and can avoid the boilerplate of all programming languages.
If not, is there anything in the queue for getting that done?
No, there isn't, partially since "pseudocode" is ill defined and can be of many different formats.
There are no plans to include anything that cannot be properly defined.
<!-- language: lang-none --> for when intelligent highlighting is inappropriate.
I'm using pseudo-PHP or pseudo-SQL when I need it, and they are highlighted pretty well.
If you really can't turn your code into actual code sample (for example, it's not feasible to write Drupal Views' filter configuration logic as an actual code), just select the language that fits your problem best (SQL in my case, with it's WHERE clausule) and make your pseudo-code similar enough to it, so the syntax highlight could work.
Well, you can always use the HTML <pre> tag and then embed HTML formatting tags within it.
Here’s the Trabb Pardo–Knuth algorithm for example (slightly modified from Wikipedia):
ask for 11 numbers to be read into a sequence S
reverse sequence S
for each item in sequence S
call a function on item, returning result
if result overflows
alert user
else
print result
The amount of formatting possible with this method is limited (the Markdown parser strips the style= attribute as usual), but for pseudocode it may be just enough.
Sometimes there is just not a reason to put an answer in a particular programming language. If the question doesn't specify one, oftentimes the pseudocode is more readable and can avoid the boilerplate of all programming languages.
That would require that you can kind of customize the syntax highlighter on the fly. It would also be additional work for you to define that. The current highlighter highlight.js does not allow customization on the fly (I think).
But if one of the existing supported languages matches your version of pseudocode closely why not using that and specifying that language manually in a code block.
Example:
<print "hello world">,<exit>
An alternative would be to use the CSS classes of the highlighter manually in code blocks like for example
<span class="str">"literal"</span>
but that doesn't work unfortunately.
As others have mentioned, pseudocode is not well defined. But to say that makes the task infeasible is pretty closed-minded - after all, a human looking at pseudo-code could highlight it decently, and surely that proves that it's possible. At least there could be a feature to highlight pseudocode poorly. In fact, many people write pseudocode in a language close to that which they are familiar, and using the syntax highlighter for that language should work pretty well. Other than that, I think syntax highlighting with lang-default does an ok job, you can judge for yourself:
def a():
map = {x: 1.2f, y='hi'}
return map
class MyClass{
a = 4,
b = 3,
}
function foo(int a, double b, MyClass c){
print("This highlights ok I guess");
for each x in the set:
x+=1
}
FOR EACH vertex in stack
IF !seen[vertex] THEN
FOR edge in E[vertex]
add vertex to seen
add vertex to stack
ELSE
do nothing
ENDIF
Of course, some pseudocode styles are highlighted better than others.
Maybe not in StackExchange. But definitely possible in general, provided that the given pseudocode is well-structured, much like the input to the algorithm packages of LaTeX.
To have pseudocode rendered in HTML as beautifully as LaTeX, try pseudocode.js.
