Re: Syntax tables for multiple modes [was: bug#22983: syntax-ppss returns wrong result.]

[Dmitry Gutov]

On 03/21/2016 02:40 PM, Vitalie Spinu wrote:

> > Strings? Indentation engines do not deal with strings, they deal with buffer
> > contents. Having them handle this possibility would also amount to sharing a
> > part of multi-mode logic.
>
> Yeh. That's the sucky part. My hope is that BEFORE-STRING will be seldom
> used.

Then let's not add that to the API until we see a concrete need for it.

> Performance is not a primary concern for indentation. Correctness and conceptual
> cleanness is at a much higher stake here. My hope is that generic helper
> functions can be optimized to re-use same temp buffer for multiple invocations
> of calculate-indent-function.

So, how about trying my alternative proposal first?

> > > Then a lot of modes don't even care about what's in the current line, so
> > > STRING-AFTER will be irrelevant as well.
>
> > Almost all of them care whether the current line contains }, or `end', or
> > `else', and so on.
>
> Indeed. But this information is trivial to retrieve from STRING-AFTER.

Feeding it to each particular indentation engine is not going to be trivial.

> > In any case, your hard-narrowing proposal is very similar. Surely you don't want
> > to keep the second element of prog-indentation-context after hard-narrowing
> > becomes available?
>
> Indeed. I was not thinking about algorithmic complexities.
>
> AFAIK if second element is removed, the third one should go as well. That leaves
> only FIRST-COLUMN then, which I personally don't mind.

OK. And that one could be replaced with the introduction of 
prog-indentation-function. Though that might be getting ahead of ourselfves.

> > > This way the
> > > request aired in bug#22983 of parse-partial-sexp == syntax-ppss will be
> > > automatically satisfied. You won't need syntax-ppss-dont-widen either.
>
> > That doesn't seem relevant. That bug is about stale cache values between
> > different narrowing bounds.
>
> Right. Those stale values won't occur in multi-modes because both syntax-ppss
> and parse-partial-sexp will always operate on same hard-narrowed regions.

We could only be sure of that for syntax-ppss calls in facilities that 
the multi-mode handles specially, like font-lock, syntax-propertize and 
indentation. Not so with any other functions the user could call.