Re: doc for multi-line font-lock

[Stefan Monnier]

> I don't understand that either.  However, there's a definite need to
> maintain syntax properties orthogonally to font-lock for other
> purposes not tied to redisplay (as discussed long ago, at least with
> gerd).

100% agreed.

> The specific case I was concerned with was treating

> \end{code}
> ...
> \begin{code}

> as a comment.  If the syntax part of that was taken care of separately
> I'd want to be able to fontify arbitrarily long blocks in either
> font-lock-comment-face or in the default face.  Would
> font-lock-multiline actually work for that?

No, font-lock-multiline is not a good answer.  You can probably get it to
work, but it'll be dog slow if the block becomes really long, and with
things like jit-lock it's difficult to make it work reliably, because
font-lock might highlight the middle of the text without ever seeing
the \end{code}, thus without knowing that there's a multiline thingy here.

But it will work with font-lock-syntactic-face-function (see the handling
of \begin{verbatim}...\end{verbatim} in tex-mode).  It still doesn't work
100% because the "contextual refontification" is delayed, but the
highlighting should eventually be correct.


        Stefan