Syntax highlighting

Perhaps you, like me, wanted to know how long our editors used syntax highlighting. Who came up with it when it happened ...

From what managed to dig:

LEXX (Live Parsing Editor), written for the VM operating system, for the purpose of computerizing Oxford English Dictionary, was one of the first, and possibly the first syntax-highlight editor. It was back in 1985 , and the author of the editor was, apparently, IBM . In addition, the editor was able to automatically indent, which is also very useful.

It is also interesting that the editor VIM , the backlight appeared already in 1998 , in version 5.1
And having scoured the change log in Emacs , I never managed to find there any mention of the appearance of such useful functionality.

In most editors, the code highlighting function is done on the basis of pattern matching, or based on regular expressions. That is not entirely optimal and may require a lot of resources, especially for large files, because some editors highlight only a fragment of text visible on the screen. Perhaps it is the resource intensity of the idea (especially for the computers of the time) and was the reason that this functionality was implemented quite recently, by computer standards. And perhaps this is due to the absence of such a need - b / w monitors.