Re: imenu fails in mode without comment-start-skip defined

[Stefan Monnier]

>> But syntax-ppss does not work correctly in all modes,
> I don't understand what the problem is, other than the need for
> syntactic fontification in some cases,

Well, nothing else than the syntactic fontification which you conveniently
brush aside as negligible.  It's actually a serious since font-lock is off
by default.  And even if it's ON, it's still a serious issue for imenu
since fontification is only applied to text that's been displayed whereas
imenu will sweep through the whole buffer, ...
And of course, there still the issue of the situations where
syntactic-fontification hasn't been done, or doesn't cover all the cases,
or ...

> but then comment-beginning doesn't necessarily work correctly either.

Indeed.  I personally think it's better to not use comment-beginning either
and just postpone the issue to post-21.4 where we can try and address it
more robustly with syntax-ppss.


        Stefan