Re: PHP mode in Emacs?

[Lennart Borgman <lennart.borgman.073@student.lu.se>]

Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen wrote:
> Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> writes:
>
>   
>> I do not know PHP.  All I can say is that I would welcome addition of
>> a good PHP mode.
>>     
>
> Has the inclusion of mmm-mode (written by Michael Shulman and others)
> been discussed previously?  It looks like the approach taken to this
> problem (multi-mode programming languages) is promising. 
>   
I do not know whether it has been discussed, but it seems to me there 
are currently unfortunately problems with this approach. I believe a 
number of things have to be addressed in Emacs before something like 
mm-mode can work for all modes. But I am not sure, it is quite complex. 
Below are however my thoughts about it.

I think the idea of having different modes in different regions in a 
buffer is very good. So I tried it with nxml-mode (actually 
nxhtml-mode), but without any real success. Dean Scarff says he had some 
success, but still problems with that nxml-mode re-fontifies region that 
has another submode (see 
http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/NxmlModeForXHTML). This is also 
what I found.

I can really see no way to stop different modes from stomping at each 
other with mmm-mode. And I can not see that it is possible to do that 
with Emacs (even the CVS version) today. To do that there must be some 
way to tell a mode only to care about a region or a list of regions and 
I can not see how to do that now. (Maybe some more things are required, 
but this is a minimum.)

For the moment I would therefore suggest either html-script.el or 
html-inlined.el. They use narrowing and changes the buffers major mode 
temporarily during narrowing.

For the future I would sugges investigating ways to do what mm-mode 
tries to do.