I'm sorry for butting in on this discussion, but I've been following it with great interest.
During the course of this thread, it has been mentioned that merging comment-cache would create two different systems: the new one used to track comments, and syntax-ppss for everything else. Is there a technical reason why this isn't being considered?
From what I've understood, the way comment-cache solves the problem is clearly superior so I'm wondering why, when it was implemented, it was restricted to tracking comments only. Wouldn't this mechanism be useful as a complete replacement for the current implementation of syntax-ppss.
It seems as though Stefan is also thinking along those lines?