how do I find out the syntactic status of a location?

[Sam Steingold]

I want to find out whether I am in a symbol, string, constant, comment
&c without knowing the details of the syntax of the specific mode, i.e.,
the code should work the same in, e.g., C and Lisp modes.
If font-lock is enabled, I can check that I am in a string or comment
using

    (memq (plist-get (text-properties-at (point)) 'face)
          '(font-lock-comment-face font-lock-string-face))

is there a better way?

thanks.

-- 
Sam Steingold (http://sds.podval.org/) on Ubuntu 11.10 (oneiric) X 11.0.11004000
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