[sepala]

I would like to suggest the following as the new features for the software development section

1. Facilitate the users copied code with "line number generator". Then the helper can see how many numbers of lines are there, and when we are helping, we can help the user to LEARN by showing the line number where the error occurred.

2. Facilitate the users code with "keyword highlighter" which highlights the keywords in the code in different colours. I know we can't identify all the keywords in all the languages, so at least the main keywords which are common.

[Ent]

One forum who've implimented this quite well is vbdotnetforums.com
Here's and example thread: http://www.vbdotnetforums.com/test-zone/47489-test.html
While they have the advantage of being monolingual, I believe that the system they use has the capacity for several languages.

The BleepingComputer forum also has generic code highlighting. It is very annoying when it gets it wrong; for example it interprets appostrophes as starting or ending strings even when the code itself is VB which treats apostrophes as starting coments. The result is that the next X lines until your next comment come out in green!

Line numbers are invaluable for programmers, if code boxes can have line numbers and no highlighting I'd consider that more than half the battle. Admittedly I'd still copy and paste the line I was referring to (refering to a line number could be confusing for the querent if they only give a subroutine, and their editor therefore has different lines) but it would definitely help to explain things.

[TechGuy]

It probably makes more sense to have the user select which language he/she is posting rather than try to guess...

Thanks for the links. I'll start looking around for a system we can use with the new version of vB.