Re: bat-mode: Inconsistent fontification. Consider using font-lock-function-name-face

[Jostein Kjønigsen]

On 9/9/19 8:10 PM, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > Cc: address@hidden
> > From: Jostein Kjønigsen <address@hidden>
> > Date: Mon, 9 Sep 2019 19:34:44 +0200
> >
> > If the concept of a label is used consistently across many major-modes, maybe 
> > it would make sense to define
> > this as a first-class font-lock concept?
> >
> > Basically we could have an official "font-lock-label-face" instead, which by 
> > default would be derived from
> > font-lock-constant-face. That way people who want labels to look more like 
> > functions can customize it on their
> > end.
> >
> > Would that be a better option?
> I don't know, I never felt the need to distinguish them.
Thanks for your feedback Eli.

Not knowing your background, I'd hate to make assumptions, but could it 
be that your work mainly involves languages where a label (a pointer) 
and a constant (also possibly a pointer) largely represents the same 
thing, as it does in C?

To contrast your experience with mine, I mostly work with languages 
where a label and a constant represents 2 semantically different things, 
and mixing them in code will more often than not cause  the compiler to 
error out.

IMO they may be -used- similarly in some languages, but there's 
intrinsically nothing fundamentally similar about them outside those 
languages.

Even completely discounting that, I don't believe adding some additional 
default font-lock faces adds any considerable bloat or runtime-cost to 
Emacs. Or am I wrong about this?

If it doesn't, I really don't see any good argument -against- adding 
more semanticly accurate font-lock faces. I'm sure there are several 
major-modes where this can be put to good use (instead of relying on 
custom-faces, like bat-mode already does).

I'll admit to not following emacs-devel intimitely, so it may be that 
this is already a common ("done to death") discussion. If so I'd 
appreciate a pointer to a thread which better highlights the current  
consensus wrt to font-lock faces.

--
Jostein