Added the grammar but how do I get it to point to file hla.xml?

What am I missing? "Fetch grammar submodules" test just throws Error: Process completed with exit code 1. with no explanation.

Scroll up and you'll find the error:

Error updating vendor/grammars/High Level Assembly
error: pathspec 'vendor/grammars/High Level Assembly' did not match any file(s) known to git

You need to add the grammar as a submodule.

Did I not in 9c8aeb6?

I have to register the submodules via the command line, don't I?..

Lightshow throws Error parsing XML grammar: Unimplemented element; is that an issue?

I have to register the submodules via the command line, don't I?..

Yup. Thankfully this is pure git so you won't need to fight dependencies etc.

Lightshow throws Error parsing XML grammar: Unimplemented element; is that an issue?

Yes, with the grammar. That is not a TextMate-compatible grammar.

That is not a TextMate-compatible grammar.

Okay, will revert then

Can you please state in the original note of this PR where the sample files came from and the license of each.

Despite there being more than >12k files, they're concentrated in surprisingly few repos:

Total files found: 12618
Unique public user/repos: 71
Unique owners: 64

@lildude Here is another syntax highlighting grammar for HLA programming language, this time for vim text editor:
https://github.com/jmahler/hla.vim
Maybe it would work?

I don't think thats in the right format for Linguist.

Yup, that won't work. The grammar needs to be a TextMate compatible grammar.

@lildude I don't know what is a TextMate compatible grammar or how to create one. Can we have the language support without syntax highlighting for now, as far as the files are being recognized in the Languages section of a repository? Or maybe can you create a TextMate compatible grammar for me based on the Notepad++ or vim syntax highlighting files. I am yet unexperienced with such things.

Yes, we can add a language without a grammar. I'm not up to the task of creating a grammar, but maybe @Alhadis can.

That all said, there's no hurry as this language is still a looooong way from being popular enough for merging this PR.

Closing for now as it'll be a while until usage is enough.

So I see that I would have to find out how to implement a language grammar by myself, for adding support for the HLA programming language? Can anyone provide me some directions about how to do that?

Create a tmLanguage grammar file to tokenise various aspects of the language. For example I have a few created at https://github.com/Nixinova/tmLanguage/tree/main/grammars.