Well, obviously I have to come to the defense of vim as well :-). I'm not sure what year vim got the capability, but I suspect around as long as emacs. This isn't for exactly the same language use case, but finding a quick example on the internet: unlet b:current_syntaxsyntax include @srcBash syntax/bash.vim syntax region srcBashHi start="..." end="..." keepend contains=@srcBash unlet b:current_syntaxsyntax include @srcHTML syntax/html.vim syntax region srcHTMLHi start="^...$" end="^...$" keepend contains=@srcHTML This is easy to adapt to either the named function convention: `html('<h1>Hello</h1>')` or to the standardized-comment convention. In general, I find any proposal to change Python "because then my text editor would need to change to accommodate the language" to be unconvincing.