Re: Emacs contributions, C and Lisp

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: David Kastrup <address@hidden>
> Date: Tue, 25 Feb 2014 10:41:42 +0100
> 
> The "annotated syntax tree" question would become more relevant for
> things like sourcecode highlighting.  But in the interest of usefully
> fast feedback when editing, it would likely make more sense to let Emacs
> do the highlighting with local rules on its own and only converse with
> GCC when it becomes necessary to resolve ambiguities (like
> declaration/expression distinctions): GCC can only make helpful
> suggestions regarding the last time the source code was syntactically
> correct, so most of the time Emacs will need to go ahead with _some_
> idea anyway.

Is it certain that we actually need a compiler for that?  Did someone
investigate whether CEDET infrastructure is capable of doing something
like that?  Since, as you point out, a compiler will probably choke on
syntactically incorrect input, shouldn't we try to look elsewhere?
After all, we don't need to parse the source completely, only as much
as needed for completion.