bug#46327: 28.0.50; octave-mode: transpose-quotes taken as string-quotes

[Juang Dse]

indeed, the ' character is the transpose operator (like in matlab),
and that patch makes emacs essentially useless for octave. Without it,
everything looks fine as I just verified.

Note that the ' character as a string occurs only in pairs, which is
(hopefully) unambiguous.

On Sun, Feb 7, 2021 at 2:06 PM Lars Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org> wrote:
>
> Juang Dse <juangdse@gmail.com> writes:
>
> > octave-mode takes the transpose sign (') for a string quote, and
> > indents incorrectly.
> >
> > This can be seen by the two lines
> > ---------------
> > x = [2 2]'
> > disp(x)
> > ---------------
> > and using indent-for-tab-command (TAB) for the 2nd line.
>
> This is due to the following patch:
>
> commit 9e68413c7f0a7f71e1cee923ace7282d14c2e686
> Author:     Noam Postavsky <npostavs@users.sourceforge.net>
> AuthorDate: Mon Aug 24 17:33:49 2020 +0200
>
>     Fix inferior octave single-quote font lock
>
>     * lisp/progmodes/octave.el (octave-mode-syntax-table): Fix
>     fontification of single quotes in inferior octave mode (bug#25517).
>
>     It looks like the problem is that octave-mode-syntax-table sets single
>     quotes as punctuation even though GNU Octave's manual says single quotes
>     are string syntax [1].
>
>     [1]:
>     https://www.gnu.org/software/octave/doc/interpreter/String-Objects.html
>
> And, indeed, that link says:
>
> "A character string in Octave consists of a sequence of characters
> enclosed in either double-quote or single-quote marks."
>
> But the ' character is also a transposition operator?  I don't know
> Octave at all -- this seems like a rather ambiguous syntax?
>
> --
> (domestic pets only, the antidote for overdose, milk.)
>    bloggy blog: http://lars.ingebrigtsen.no