Add syntax highlighting for the system-verilog tag

Question

Please add the same syntax highlighting as the verilog tag to the system-verilog tag for consistency. Currently, verilog has syntax highlighting, but system-verilog does not. The system-verilog tag info aptly states that it "is a backwards-compatible superset of verilog". Thus, it makes sense for both to use the same highlighting.

Several questions are tagged with both, and the highlighting looks fine. For example, this question.

Answer 1

Sorry for the delay on this one.

To answer your question, yes, I have found where I could change the syntax highlighter for the system-verilog tag (currently none), to match the verilog tag highlighting.

However as kindly explained in this answer from MarkU, the syntax highlighting module being used for the verilog tag is called "lang-vhdl". There is no syntax highlighter specifically for Verilog (or System Verilog) available for me to choose. (The SE decision not to include Verilog & System Verilog highlighting in the SE-specific highlight.js is stated here.)

Before my upvote for usefulness, that answer from MarkU had 1 downvote and 0 upvotes (and no explanatory comment for the downvote) - so was the original downvote to that answer, because there is some big negative consequence to the proposed change which no-one else has mentioned?

Summary:

I believe I can make the change you requested, but the downvote on that answer pointing out that it will invoke the lang-vhdl highlighting, is puzzling. Further feedback would be helpful.

Answer 2

Some notes:

As of 2020-09-24, all stack exchange sites use highlight.js for code-formatting and syntax-highlighting, see Goodbye, Prettify. Hello highlight.js! Swapping out our Syntax Highlighter

The list of languages supported by highlight.js is at https://github.com/highlightjs/highlight.js/blob/main/SUPPORTED_LANGUAGES.md and verilog and VHDL are both on the list.

For some strange reason, tag verilog is configured to use the lang-vhdl highlighter:

https://electronics.stackexchange.com/tags/verilog/info
Code Language (used for syntax highlighting): lang-vhdl

I don't know why. The highlight.js posted on github has separate options for verilog and vhdl, but stackoverflow What is syntax highlighting and how does it work? mentions that they use their own fork of this library, and don't have all of the modules installed. At any rate, if the lang-vhdl highlighter is working well enough for verilog, I suppose it would work for system verilog just as well, right?

Is it possible for one of our local site moderators to edit the system-veriog tag's Code Language field to match the verilog and vhdl tags (i.e. lang-vhdl)? Or is this something that requires the whole meta feature-request route to the stackexchange community managers?

Answer 3

One other (labor-intensive) way to mitigate this lack of code highlighting for questions tagged system-verilog but not verilog would be to edit each question so that its code blocks are introduced with

```verilog (whatever highlighter tag verilog uses)

or

```lang-verilog (use verilog highlighter, regardless of the tag default highlighter)

instead of just ``` (which uses the tag default highlighter).

Just trying that out here, maybe the syntax highlighting doesn't work on meta?

# example code using default highlighter
module abc(input net d, output reg e)
assign e = d
endmodule

-- example code using lang-vhdl
module abc(input net d, output reg e)
assign e = d
endmodule

# example code using lang-verilog
module abc(input net d, output reg e)
assign e = d
endmodule

-- example code using same highlighting as tag:vhdl
module abc(input net d, output reg e)
assign e = d
endmodule

# example code using same highlighting as tag:verilog
module abc(input net d, output reg e)
assign e = d
endmodule

# example code using same highlighting as tag:system-verilog
module abc(input net d, output reg e)
assign e = d
endmodule