gas-mode.el - Comments welcome

[Heike C. Zimmerer]

A few days ago, I have posted gas-mode.el, a mode to edit assembly
language files, to gnu.emacs.sources.  I once started out to write
this code since I was not satisfied with the current asm-mode.  At
some later point I decided it could be of general interest and made it
ready for a first release.

Richard then contacted me, asking about the whys and hows, and a few
e-mails later we agreed to make it a replacement for the current
asm-mode.el.

It is now time time to check it out in order to make it ready for
inclusion with GNU Emacs.  So I'm asking you for comments.  If you do
assembly language programming, you could try it out.  If you know
someone who might be interested, you could make him aware of it.
Also, since Lisp is not the language I usually do much programming in,
tips, hints and comments on coding style and conformance to coding
conventions are welcome.

The name `gas-mode' is somewhat misleading; it is no more specific to
the GNU gas assembler as the current asm-mode is (we'll change the
name to `asm-mode' later).  For users of asm-mode, a switch to
gas-mode should go rather smoothly (and you get extra features like
code beautifying, paragraph-filling which is sensitive to the kind of
comment you're in, limited support for embedded C-declarations meant
for automatic export into .h files, symbol highlighting and jumping
between matching definitions and references - all that at no extra
cost ...).  There might be one exception however: cases where the
comment character differs from the standard value (?\;) are not yet
tested; here I could use some helping hands and some real world
examples which work or don't work yet.

The documentation: Until now, there's only the existing doc written
for asm-mode, the mode-specific help (C-h m) of gas-mode, and the
Commentary: part at the beginning of gas-mode.el.  Some help from
proofreaders will be required when more doc evolves since English is
not my native language.

I've put up a web page for the distribution of updated versions.
You'll always find the most recent version at

   http.//www.hczim.de/software/gas-mode.html

I'll post a message pointing there in gnu.emacs.sources - not for each
update, but when major changes become available.  There's already a
new version there.  The main difference to the one posted in
gnu.emacs.sources is that the doc strings and some commentaries have
been polished.  Also a bug (you're not very likely to stumble upon)
has been fixed.  For testing how it works, the already posted code is
sufficient.  If you'd like to have a look at the internals, I
recommend downloading the new version.

- Heike