bug#4030: forward-sexp parses character literal ?; as comment

[era+emacsbugs@iki.fi]

Package: emacs
Version: 23.1.50.1
Severity: normal
X-Debbugs-Cc: era+emacsbugs@iki.fi

This is a pared-down version of Ubuntu bug report #405498
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/405498 -- please see the URL for the
full bug report.

It seems that forward-sexp (and its underlying C implementation) does
not cope correctly with a character literal semicolon, seeing instead
(effectively) end of line.

In the *scratch* buffer if you write (insert ?;) you can evaluate this
Lisp code and it behaves as intended (inserts a semicolon in the current
buffer) but doing M-x forward-sexp just before the expression results in
an "Unbalanced parentheses" error.

This causes problems e.g. when Customize wants to edit an .emacs file
which contains the character constant ?; anywhere in it, because
Customize uses forward-sexp to parse the user's .emacs file.

/* era */

-- 
If this were a real .signature, it would suck less.  Well, maybe not.

/* era */

-- 
If this were a real .signature, it would suck less.  Well, maybe not.