Re: CC Mode and electric-pair "problem".

[João Távora]

On Sun, Jun 17, 2018 at 9:13 PM, Alan Mackenzie <address@hidden> wrote:

Hello, Glenn.

On Sun, Jun 17, 2018 at 12:58:53 -0400, Glenn Morris wrote:
> Alan Mackenzie wrote:

> > However, the test suite (make check) threw up another discrepancy, in a
> > test called
> > electric-pair-whitespace-chomping-2-at-point-4-in-c++-mode-in-strings.

> Hello, is this still being worked on?
> The test continues to fail on RHEL 7 and hydra.nixos.org.

From my point of view, the bug is not being worked on this very day, but
has by no means been forgotten.  It has needed a period of mulling over.
I think João sees it the same way.

Yes, while mulling over things is generally good, I believe the problem

from Glenn's perspective is the nuisance of checking whether every

test failure is something to worry about or just the thing being

mulled over.

So I suggest taking a quick temporary action to make the test pass

and then think about how to do it properly.  This action could be

disabling the test temporarily but IME that invariably buries the

issue ad eternum. So it's better to do it in cc-mode.

Although it won't be difficult to fix, this bug is an awkward thing, and
will need decisions (smallish ones) to be taken.

My favoured method would be to alter electric-pair--skip-whitespace such
that a NL terminating a string (as contrasted with a NL terminating a
comment) would be allowed to be scanned over.

I'm OK with adding an customization point to

electric-pair--skip-whitespace that c-mode can customize.  But I also

wonder whether the benefit to end-users of handling NL-terminated

strings are worth it.  Perhaps there are indeed benefits, it's just that

I haven't seen them argued.  But more importantly perhaps there are

ways to reap these benefits in a way that doesn't require changes

to e-p-m, or even better, in a way that benefits all of Emacs,

not just c-mode.

So, in practice, is the advantage here that the user is visually

warned of an invalid NL-terminated string?

João