Dear Monkey…
The issue is quite broader. I work with Perl. And that language has some rather queer exceptions. One example: @my_array is … you guessed, an array! $#my array is the highest index currently occupied. But EmEditor considers everything beyond the ‘#’ as comment. And there are many more exceptions.
Try and open one of the syntax highlighting files. Open Tools->Properties for the current configuration->Highlight(1). Click the ‘Export’ button and same the ‘esy’ file. Its syntax seem simple enough. Especially note the line
#Keyword color=4,word=on,rightall=off,case=on,insidetag=off,regexp=off,rightall2=off
There seem to be a possibility to specify some syntax highlighting by regular expressions. I once asked Yutaka for some usage examples. He doesn’t seem to consider this request as worthy of his attention. May be you can convince him otherwise…?