Re: syntax-after

[Richard Stallman]

    modify-syntax-entry  aref(syntax-table)  char-syntax  syntax-after      
    "w"                  (2)                 ?w           (?w)
    "w p"                (1048578)           ?w           args-out-of-range
    ". 124b"             (2818049)           ?.           args-out-of-range

The args-out-of-range is simply a bug.  I intended syntax-after to
return (?w) and (?.)  in those cases, so that the car of the value
would match char-syntax.

    The raw representation (i.e. the cons cell representation used inside the
    chartables used as syntax-tables) does appear at various places (it appears
    if you do (aref <syntax-table> ?\[) or if you lookup the `syntax-table'
    text-property, it is used in font-lock-syntactic-keywords for code that
    needs to work on Emacs-20, ...) and it seems difficult to get rid of it now;
    so no, you haven't reduced the number of representations.

I intended this change as a step towards reducing the mess
of these different representations.  However, you've convinced
me the change should be undone.

I don't know if I will have net access this week--could you please
undo it?

      If you find this raw data to
    be intimidating, we should provide another function `syntax-class' such that

       (syntax-class (syntax-after)) == (char-syntax (char-after))

I guess we should do that.

Maybe we should make modify-syntax-entry accept these values,
as well as the strings it currently accepts.