Yes, I've written tools for existing languages, and found just getting the parser right to be a challenge, be it with Emacs highlighting, flex/bison, what have you. Real languages aren't as tidy as the textbook examples.
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/smcdirm/managedti...
Co-designing your editor with your language allows for a better experience.
You are right in that all of this is basically undocumented in textbooks. Even their presentation on on parsing is mostly unhelpful (if you want an error tolerant incremental parser for your editor, recursive descent works very well).
Does time itself reveal itself as the horizon of being?
One thing that is cool is how time is related to observation, the same thing that happens in quantum entanglement. If you don't observe the state of an object, time doesn't really exist.