Re: forward-comment and syntax-ppss

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Clément Pit--Claudel <address@hidden>
> Date: Fri, 9 Dec 2016 17:33:09 -0500
> 
> Alan, is it valid to say that you view narrowing as a convenient editing 
> feature that lets you restrict operations to a subsection of the buffer?  
> Something like a "window" over the buffer (or maybe "stencil" would be a 
> better term?), which doesn't change any of semantic meaning, but just 
> conveniently restricts motion?
> In that sense, your vision of narrowing is similar to my applying two 
> overlays to make the beginning of the buffer invisible up to a point, and the 
> end of the buffer invisible starting from a point, right?

It is similar, but not equivalent, because neither search commands nor
the display engine will stop where the invisible text starts.

> Stefan, am I correct in thinking that the narrowing that you mention above is 
> of a different nature, in the sense that if I narrow a buffer to the range 
> a…b it's just as if I had copied that portion of the buffer to a totally 
> separate, disconnected buffer (possibly running a different mode), and the 
> text would get copied back into the original buffer when I widen?

This is the only meaning of narrowing that exists in Emacs as of now.

> Maybe the solution is to just give these two things a different name?

The other thing would have to be implemented first.  And if it is
indistinguishable from invisible text, then we already have it, just
under a different name ;-)