Re: 'end' odds & ends

[Quentin Spencer]

address@hidden wrote:

> > | Now, the second detail about 'end'.  The emacs lisp file doesn't
> > | recognize 'end' except as the end of a conditional or loop.  Therefore,
> > | it claims a mismatch and loses track of indentation.  (I know zilch
> > | about Lisp.)  Anyone familiar with Lisp know if this is an easy fix?  Or
> > | might there be something tricky about it?
> >
> > Yes, it is somewhat tricky to decide whether end is being used inside
> > an index expression.  What rule would you use (need not be stated in
> > Lisp)?  Once you've decided that, the fix is to either modify
> > octave-block-end-regexp appropriately, or, if the rule can't be stated
> > in a regexp, to replace occurrences of
> >
> >  (looking-at octave-block-end-regexp)
> >
> > with the function that can determine whether we are looking at the end
> > of a block and that is not confused by other uses of "end".
> >    
>
> Yes, but can't the meaning be discerned from the fact that "end" used as
> an index always has a round parentheses about it?  Parentheses around an
> end wouldn't be valid when "end" means end of a loop or conditional.
>
> Dan
>
>  
It doesn't necessarily. I have used the following to extract the first 
and last elements from a vector:
a([1,end]);
Or, suppose you wanted to do a cylic shift of a vector:
a=a([end,1:end-1]);
So, there are a lot of exceptions you could cook up ...

Quentin