Re: [MMM] Re: narrow-to-here-document

[Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org>]

    The complementary approach is to have many small buffers and do the
    editing there, but have one big buffer which serves as a view into
    the many small buffers.  This approach has been suggested by
    Richard.

I think I see a misunderstanding, because this is not what I meant to
suggest.  I suggested pseudo-indirect buffers as a way of being able
to deal with the same text using different key bindings, different
buffer-local values, different major modes.  In effect, they are
themes for bindings.  They would all share the same text, just as
user-visible indirect buffers do.

The idea of splitting up the text into many small buffers which would
be virtually concatenated is a completely different one.  I think that
idea is a non-starter because it would require changing nearly every
Emacs primitive in a very complex way.

    Maybe it is sufficient to just allow for ignoring parts of the
    buffer.  Let's say you are mixing modes A and B.  Let's further say
    that each A chunk needs to be considered separately, and all the B
    chunks should be considered to be concatenated (as in the literate
    programming case).  Then you would arrange things so that when point
    is in an A region all the rest of the buffer is ignored.  And when
    point is in a B region then all A regions are ignored, but the other
    B regions are not ignored.

This has the merit that we could implement it for syntax parsing
and font lock without changing most of Emacs at all.