Re: elisp beginner's parens question ??

[Thien-Thi Nguyen <ttn@gnuvola.org>]

() William Case <billlinux@rogers.com>
() Thu, 26 Apr 2007 22:38:24 -0400

   What I was really asking was how the interpreter or emacs uses
   parenthesis or how parenthesis are nested.  Put another way, I was
   trying to develop for myself a minds eye view of how check-parens
   works.

i share this desire, and did this to get a quick (10sec) overview:
C-h f check-parens RET         ; what do you do?
C-x o TAB                      ; where do you do it?
RET                            ; how do you do it?
[ogle ogle]

from this i see that one of the funcs called is `scan-sexps' and there
is also some kind of error handling.

   Does check-parens just count left parens and compare that to the
   number of right parens to find an error, or does it actually examine
   nested parens pairs and work inword (or outward) ?

it uses `scan-sexps' and handles errors that `scan-sexps' throws.  these
are things i didn't know before starting this message, and will probably
forget a few moments after C-c C-c, but the method for re-knowing is
what is important.  perhaps that is the mental tip you seek.

thi