Octave emacs lisp gobbledy-gook

[Daniel J Sebald]

As you can probably tell from the subject, I've been frustratingly 
trying to get my xemacs editor to properly load the octave-mod.el file.  
To this point, I've managed to get the lisp file to load in emacs.

This is with Fedora Core and it's emacs setup.  (If there is anyone out 
there who has managed this, please let me know.)  The most recent 
discussion in the archive is Aug 2004 initiated by Jon Stickel.  I'm 
running 2.1.64 which is December.

Part of the problem was chasing, perhaps, outdated documentation.  In 
the source for 2.1.64 of the emacs subdirectory in the octave-mod.el 
file it says:

To begin using this mode for all `.m' files that you edit, add the
following lines to your `.emacs' file:

 (autoload 'octave-mode \"octave-mod\" nil t)
 (setq auto-mode-alist
       (cons '(\"\\\\.m$\" . octave-mode) auto-mode-alist))

However, both of the those commands seemed to cause errors in emacs.  I 
could leave out the first line, and the Fedora setup already declares 
"octave-mode".  However, the documentation should probably be changed to 
something that works if it is present in .emacs.  (What that would be, I 
have no idea.  You might look in the lisp file 
/usr/local/share/emacs/site-lisp/loaddefs.el.)

So, the one thing I can say is that I patterned the auto-mode-alist 
after one I found for a different program.  Placing:

(setq auto-mode-alist (append '(("\\.m$" . octave-mode))
                 auto-mode-alist))

in my .emacs file seems to work.

BTW, it says in the emacs "info" node that emacs looks in 
/usr/local/share/emacs/site-lisp for .el files.  I found that not to be 
true in my case.  Putting the 2.1.64/emacs/*.el files there didn't 
work.  I had to link them to /usr/share/emacs/21.3/lisp.  (I removed the 
ones in /usr/share/emacs/21.3/lisp/progmodes because I want to make sure 
I have the latest in the 2.1.64 tree.)

Dan

Now, xemacs...