Re: A vision for multiple major modes: some design notes

[Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de>]

Hello, Richard.

On Fri, Apr 22, 2016 at 02:58:53PM -0400, Richard Stallman wrote:
> [[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
> [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
> [[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]

> The design seems to assume that every island starts with a
> one-character delimiter that always starts an island, and that there
> is anothehr one-character delimiter that always ends an island.

> Is that really the intention, or did I misunderstand?

That's not quite how I see it working.  There needs to be some sort of
delimiter to start an island which must be at least 1 character wide.
On this character/one of these characters, the "super mode" will set an
"open island" syntax-table text property.  Similarly, there must be some
delimiter at the end of the island to set a "close island" property on.

For example, in a shell script with an embedded AWK script:

VARIABLE=$(gawk '<script>' < <input-file>) ....
                ^        ^

, the text properties would be set on the marked characters, making
<script> an island which would be initialised to AWK Mode.  As a minor
point, the delimiters enclose an island, but aren't part of it - they
are part of the surrounding text.		

> -- 
> Dr Richard Stallman
> President, Free Software Foundation (gnu.org, fsf.org)
> Internet Hall-of-Famer (internethalloffame.org)
> Skype: No way! See stallman.org/skype.html.

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).