Re: Islands and streams [Was: convert regex.c, .... to standard C]

[Chong Yidong]

Alan Mackenzie <address@hidden> writes:

> Movement commands normally don't recognise islands as anything
> unusual, and just move into/out of them.  By binding variable
> "respect-islands" to non-nil, any movement command would skip over any
> islands it encountered, and such commands could not move point out of
> an island.
>
> Several islands with the same major mode can by chained together as a
> @dfn{stream}.  When respect-islands is non-nil, movement commands can
> jump over the "ocean" to the next/previous island in the chain.

Sorry I'm late to the discussion, but the existing concept of fields
does something similar---it restricts certain motion and editing
commands.  Have you looked into the possibility of extending fields to
do what you describe?