"Semantic highlighting" might be an interesting concept to study further. As in, annotated or (semi)automatic highlighting of "pay extra attention while reading" parts of code – tricky, nonobvious, mem/thread-safety critical sections, code that assumes invariants or is responsible for their maintenance, and so on.
Some existing examples are "warning squiggles" added by IDE integrated linters, as well as language-level syntactic markers for "here be dragons" parts like Rust’s `unsafe {}` that can be highlighted by standard syntax highlighters (as an aside, it occurs to me that for simplicity’s sake most syntax coloring is in fact merely lexical coloring, but I digress…)
It seems to me that many color schemes these days choose to render comments in grayed-out, low-contrast colors. I find this to defeat the purpose of comments and maintain the unfortunate notion that they are something nearly redundant. A properly written comment tells me something nonobvious and should be displayed prominently rather than faded into obscurity!
Some existing examples are "warning squiggles" added by IDE integrated linters, as well as language-level syntactic markers for "here be dragons" parts like Rust’s `unsafe {}` that can be highlighted by standard syntax highlighters (as an aside, it occurs to me that for simplicity’s sake most syntax coloring is in fact merely lexical coloring, but I digress…)
It seems to me that many color schemes these days choose to render comments in grayed-out, low-contrast colors. I find this to defeat the purpose of comments and maintain the unfortunate notion that they are something nearly redundant. A properly written comment tells me something nonobvious and should be displayed prominently rather than faded into obscurity!