Re: forward-comment and syntax-ppss

[Lars Ingebrigtsen]

I haven't really followed the discussion here, so this has probably been
all said before.  :-)  But I, too, find the narrowing functionality in
Emacs to be less than perfect.

There's three major use cases:

1) Modes that use narrowing as a required thing for the mode to work
properly.  The main offender here is Info-mode, and I think it should
just be rewritten to not rely on narrowing to work.  That is: No
Narrowing In Modes.  There's always a better way to achieve the same
effects, I think.

2) The programmatic use in Lisp programs always looks like this:

  (save-restriction
    (narrow-to-region (point) (point-max))
    ...)

or something, which is less clear than it could be.  As we did with
`(save-excursion (set-buffer...))' we could introduce a new special form
for this behaviour, like

  (with-region (point) (point-max)
    ...)

3) Interactive narrowing should be stack-based, so that you can easily
narrow to things, do something, then narrow some more, and then pop that
narrowing to return to the previous.  It's something I have wanted for a
long time.

-- 
(domestic pets only, the antidote for overdose, milk.)
   bloggy blog: http://lars.ingebrigtsen.no