Re: Syntax tables for multiple modes [was: bug#22983: syntax-ppss returns wrong result.]

[Vitalie Spinu]

>> On Tue, Mar 22 2016 22:07, Stefan Monnier wrote:

> Still, in the ERB case we'd need to mix the HTML context with the Ruby
> context, so the representation of the context can't be "internal to the
> major mode".

The signature is internal to the inner mode but will have a generic part which
multi-mode can understand and modify. Multi-mode will take care of the
interleaving and mixing when needed. I think there is absolutely no way to avoid
a "superviser", but each inner mode need not know about the big picture.

In erb case each ruby line will be asked for an indentation offset in a narrowed
buffer with context from previous ruby span. Then multi-mode will indent the
whole <% ... %> according to this inner offset plus an offset derived from
parent html element. The last step is to ask the ruby mode to produce an
indentation context at the end of this ruby line and cache it.

> But I guess we could represent the context as an integer (the position from
> which to parse backward).

No, no. Context should not have absolute positions in it. That would ruin the
whole thing. It should contain information about the nesting of language
constructs sufficient to be able to indent first line of an inner span without
any other positional knowledge.

For example, if current line is directly part of IF block, most languages don't
care what precedes IF head at all, only the offset of IF. So an entry in the
context data structure might look like (IF . IF-OFFSET). If line number within
the block is important then you can pass (IF IF-OFFSET . RELATIVE-LINE). My
hunch is that for most languages you would be able to reduce indentation to a
small number of block-continuation constructs (less than 10).

  Vitalie