Re: font-lock-comment-delimiter-face

[Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>]

>     Seems odd to introduce a new face whose name refers to "comment" even
>     though the only two known uses for it are not for comments but for
>     email citations.

> Those were the only uses yet implemented for it,
> but now I've changed font-lock-fontify-syntactically-region
> to use it for comment delimiters.  I think this will work
> for all modes.  It works for C mode and Lisp mode.

Taking a second look at the idea I can't help feeling like it's the wrong
solution.  Basically, nobody has ever requested for comment-delimiters to be
hilighted differently than the comment body, so we're adding a feature that
nobody asked for (and this, one-year into a feature freeze).

Problem is that this feature doesn't work quite right: the border cases are
non-trivial and nobody has the expertise/time/willingness to fix it.

But the oddest part of all is that this was introduced because of something
completely unrelated: the ability to mark mail quoting-prefix without
marking the quoted text.  And this, of course, has nothing to do with
comments, other than an accidental reuse of font-lock-comment-face.

Please, let's rename this new face to something sensible like
mail-citation-prefix-face (or the same without the "-face" suffix) and stop
the madness about comment delimiters.


        Stefan