ken<gebser@mousecar.com> writes:
On 06/26/2010 11:05 PM Deniz Dogan wrote:
2010/6/27 ken<gebser@mousecar.com>:
On 06/26/2010 06:53 AM Paul Drummond wrote:
Thanks for the responses guys.
....
I presume that Emacs hackers either a) put up with it or b) spend a lot
of time fixing each case until they are happy.
I suspect the answer is b. ;-)
I wish there was a single minor-mode that fixes all the word boundary
issues for every major-mode I use! I can but dream. Or maybe I will
get round to doing it myself one day! ;)
Cheers,
Paul Drummond
Is it possible to specify word boundaries for a particular mode?
Yes, it's part of the syntax table. See e.g. `modify-syntax-entry'.
Thanks for the pointer to that function.
The behavior I see in need of repair is the role of so-called "comments"
in sentence syntax.</tag> For instance, immediately before this
sentence are two spaces... which should signify the end of the
previous sentence. But functions like "forward-sentence" and
"fill-paragraph" and "backward-sentence" don't recognize it.
Said another way, the "</tag>" string obscures the relationship
between the period before it and the two spaces after it and so fails
to see that one sentence ends and another starts. This occurs in
text-mode and seems to be inherited by other modes.
If I'm reading "modify-syntax-entry" correctly, the default meanings
of '<' and'>' are, respectively, beginning and end of comment, so
modifying them wouldn't fix this problem. Or can this be remedied by
a change in the syntax table? Or is this a bug?
For this particular case, I think you can modify the value of the
`sentence-end' variable (which is returned by the `sentence-end'
function? The whole thing is a little confusing). You'd probably be best
off starting with the docstring for the sentence-end function, and
working back from there.
I think the `sentence-end' variable is automatically buffer-local, which
means if you change it in a mode-hook it ought to work the way you want.
I agree that the whole syntax thing feels like a very well-polished
hack.
E