“Syntax highlighting” is an unfortunate misnomer, since pattern matching is considerably weaker than syntactic analysis. It would be more accurate to call it “unreliable keyword, string, and comment recognition”.

From https://www.researchgate.net/publication/258629476_Displaying_and_Editing_Source_Code_in_Software_Engineering_Environments

I periodically argue that computer language 'syntax' should be called 'punctuation'.

Love it 😁