Linguist: .al files are associated with Perl, and not the AL language (D365 BC)

[borisimple]

All repositories on the GitHub with Dynamics 365 Business Central projects, will show that the language used is Perl, and not AL.

Under you will find only one example, but literally every repository is affected. -> Waldo repo

Based on #2362, .al extension is used for Perl autoload files.

Expected language:

AL

Detected language:

Perl

[Alhadis]

@borisimple Could you include some links to AL language documentation? That way we'll have something to use when filtering search results to determine whether it's eligible for support by GitHub/Linguist.

[borisimple]

@Alhadis Here's the link

[Alhadis]

Thanks. I also found the relevant repository on GitHub, which provides a syntax highlighting grammar we can use (provided it meets eligibility).

[Alhadis]

Ugh, I didn't notice that we already support it (I assumed the highlighting was coming from the Perl grammar…) That'll teach me for being lazy. 😅

In that case, we can solve this by adding a heuristic to match commonly-used AL constructs; codeunit looks tempting, but we'd need to be very specific about how it's matched, since it's easy to match valid Perl code, too.

We'd welcome a pull-request to add the heuristic. 😉 See CONTRIBUTING.md for info on getting started.

[borisimple]

Hmm, it seems that I did not research it well, as somebody already did this a few days ago!

Add Microsoft AL Code Language #4916

[Alhadis]

Currently, the AL language entry is named AL code, which sounds redundant. Should we rename it to simply AL…?

[borisimple]

I think that would be great!

[lildude]

Hmm, it seems that I did not research it well, as somebody already did this a few days ago!

Add Microsoft AL Code Language #4916

Yup, and it's already live on GitHub.com

Under you will find only one example, but literally every repository is affected. -> Waldo repo

This will be because the repo hasn't been touched since support was added. We do not go back and reassess every repo when we make a new Linguist release as it would be incredibly resource intensive for little gain. That, and any other AL repo, will be re-analyzed the next time a change is pushed.

[borisimple]

@lildude

This makes sense now. Thanks for the feedback.

Although it would still be nice that extension is called "AL" only instead of "AL Code" (in Azure DevOps it's called like that) 😏

I am closing this issue now.