bug#36432: 26.2; SMIE does not request forward tokens when point is at point-max

[Sam Halliday]

On 29/06/2019, Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> wrote:
>> From: Sam Halliday <sam.halliday@gmail.com>
>> Date: Sat, 29 Jun 2019 13:34:06 +0100
>> Cc: 36432@debbugs.gnu.org
>>
>> > ??? There can be noting at point-max, as that position is beyond the
>> > last buffer position.  Did you mean the position just before that?  Or
>> > am I missing something here?
>> >
>>
>> I mean at point-max.
>>
>> Consider this layout algorithm
>>
>> https://gitlab.com/tseenshe/haskell-tng.el/blob/tng/haskell-tng-layout.el
>>
>> and this lexer
>>
>> https://gitlab.com/tseenshe/haskell-tng.el/blob/tng/haskell-tng-lexer.el
>>
>> that can continue to produce tokens even when the point is at the very
>> end of the buffer.
>
> So you create an illusion of characters beyond the EOB?
>
> How would Emacs know this is the case?

When testing it is possible to keep polling the lexer until it returns
nil when at point-max, rather than looking at `point-max` and giving
up. I think that could work in general inside SMIE.
https://gitlab.com/tseenshe/haskell-tng.el/blob/tng/test/haskell-tng-lexer-test.el

I suspect the example forward lexer, from the documentation
https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_mono/elisp.html#SMIE-Lexer
would be ok in this situation. I'd be concerned that existing lexers
would throw an error if they were polled when at the beginning/end of
the buffer unexpectedly.

BTW, this also happens at the start of the buffer. SMIE doesn't ask
for backwards tokens when at the beginning.

> Why don't you also override
> point-max to make it consistent with those illusory characters?

Hmm, that is a workaround worth exploring. I'm not sure what the
consequences would be of changing something so fundamental. I think
changing SMIE would probably be easier, even with a monkey patch of
the relevant function or advice. I can have a go at trying to do that.
I just need to figure out exactly which function is doing the check.