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Re: info faces for strings and quotations


From: Stefan Monnier
Subject: Re: info faces for strings and quotations
Date: Wed, 06 Oct 2004 00:53:11 -0400
User-agent: Gnus/5.11 (Gnus v5.11) Emacs/21.3.50 (gnu/linux)

> And, the same rare problems can be seen with font-lock highlighting of Emacs

It's actually slightly different: the nature of programming languages
implies that there exist an automatic way to unambiguously define what is
a correct parse.  I.e., font-lock highlighting has bugs, but they can
clearly be recognized as such (and often fixed if it matters enough).
Also font-lock bugs generally can be worked around by changing the
source code because such buffers are generally writable.

In Info files, the "..." and `...' syntax is not unambiguous (it is intended
to be parsed by humans only), so there is no automatic system that works
100% percent: any fix for a particular case will introduce problems
elsewhere.  And Info buffers are normally read-only and most Info users will
have a hard time finding the Info or Texinfo files to edit them (and they
often can't edit them because they don't have the required access rights).

Your regexps work great for Info pages describing Elisp code.  For Info
pages relating to some other language where the convention for escape
sequences in strings is significantly different, they may work
very poorly.  But that's what the config var is for, anyway.

I would probably turn it on ;-)


        Stefan




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