mode-specific sexps

mode-specific sexps

[Joe Corneli]

Note that the syntax of sexps is not quite right for use in all
modes.  For example, <1000 is considered to be one sexp and you can
legitimately set it in lisp modes -- (setq <1000 10) -- however, in
LaTeX mode I think this should be regarded as two sexps, a `<'
together with a `1000'.  Advice on to change the definition of a
sexp for LaTeX mode would be appreciated.  My initial investigations
led to `scan-sexps' but this is in C code and I'm hesitant about
messing with that if I don't need to.

I'll probably have some followup questions on this topic related to
my austex.el minor mode

 http://www.ma.utexas.edu/~jcorneli/a/elisp/austex.el

(also in gnu.emacs.sources recently), but this seems like a good
place to start.

Re: mode-specific sexps

[Stefan Monnier]

> Note that the syntax of sexps is not quite right for use in all
> modes.  For example, <1000 is considered to be one sexp and you can
> legitimately set it in lisp modes -- (setq <1000 10) -- however, in
> LaTeX mode I think this should be regarded as two sexps, a `<'
> together with a `1000'.  Advice on to change the definition of a
> sexp for LaTeX mode would be appreciated.  My initial investigations
> led to `scan-sexps' but this is in C code and I'm hesitant about
> messing with that if I don't need to.

Read the section about syntax-tables in the elisp manual.
It won't answer your question, but it should hopefully help you rewrite your
question so we can give you a more useful answer.

If the question was

   how do I get (forward-sexp 2) to step over "<1111", then the answer is
   somewhere between "you can't" and "maybe try forward-sexp-function".


-- Stefan