Use symbol anchors in generic.el

[Miles Bader]

What do people think of the following change to generic.el, to use \_<
and \_> when matching keywords, instead of \< and \>?

I defined a mode (for povray) using `define-generic-mode', which uses
_lots_ of keywords, and the annoying result was that the keywords were
highlighted even they occurred as part of user symbols, when adjoined
using `_'.

I could fix this by making `_' a word-constituent instead of a
symbol-constituent, but that's not really right, and makes M-f
etc. behave annoyingly.

The following simple patch makes my mode behave much more reasonably,
and making keywords match whole symbols rather than just words seems
like it would be the more correct behavior in most cases.

Thanks,

-Miles


diff -u lisp/generic.el.\~1\~ lisp/generic.el
--- lisp/generic.el.~1~ 2004-05-18 21:30:10.000000000 +0900
+++ lisp/generic.el     2004-09-09 21:47:30.000000000 +0900
@@ -405,10 +405,10 @@
 The regexp is highlighted with FACE."
   (unless (listp keywords-list)
     (error "Keywords argument must be a list of strings"))
-  (list (concat prefix "\\<"
+  (list (concat prefix "\\_<"
                ;; Use an optimized regexp.
                (regexp-opt keywords-list t)
-               "\\>" suffix)
+               "\\_>" suffix)
        1
        face))
 

-- 
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  [George Carlin]