major mode for fpscalc + some meta

[Emanuel Berg <embe8573@student.uu.se>]

I'm giving this group a third shot. I have a new
strategy for not getting into flame wars. That's meta,
so I won't go into details, but trust me, I'll not get
into another flame war as true as the Earth makes one
revolution around the sun in 365.25 days.

Another side note: I changed my mind, Juanma was right
in saying that C++ in all honesty cannot be described as
"straightforward".

OK, not dwelling on the past ...

I wanted to share this with you: I made a major mode for
the tool fpscalc. fpscalc (fps = fixed priority
schedulability) is a tool that computes response times
and workloads for tasks and real time systems, in order
to do schedulability analysis (i.e., will all tasks
complete prior to their deadlines?).

Have a look at the dump [1] to get a feeling what it is
all about.

The mode includes:

1. Very ambitious font lock - looks like a circus at
   first, but once you get used to it, it is very
   useful. (I didn't use the font-lock faces because I
   want everything to be configurable on a
   per-mode/-application/whatever basis.)
2. Comment and uncomment with M-;
3. Indentation (very easy - I just used the C mode ditto
   - but nonetheless, it is there)
4. A defun ("compute") to run the tool from a script
   (shown in Emacs), and then have Emacs show the result
   of fpscalc crunching that script.

I didn't had any "professional" material to guide me, so
I just made it work as I always do, by being active,
making it work by outworking the opposition. Therefore,
there might be some formal stuff missing to make it a
"real" major mode. If so, please make me aware of it.

Unlike all my other Emacs hacking, this is something
that will be used not just by me but by dedicated,
serious people, so I would be very appreciative if you
gave me feedback.

Note on the dump: It turns out, fbcat produces PPM
files, and not PNG. I used ppmtobmp to make a BMP of
it. It really doesn't matter; I say it just so you won't
be confused by the inconsistency of the filename and the
shell command extensions.

[1 - dump]
http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573/fps/fpscalc_mode.bmp

[source]
http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573/fps/fpscalc.el

-- 
Emanuel Berg - programmer (hire me! CV below)
computer projects: http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573
internet activity: http://home.student.uu.se/embe8573