My 2nd patch was wrong as I noticed too late yesterady, sorry for that. Unfortunately I didn't have time to fix it. Here is one that works (at least in my emacs), if any one would like to test the idea and play with idea of using literal elisp. It is not only about being able to omit ';' in comments. The idea is that normally in elisp, compiler skips comment-lines and evaluate everything else. Here compiler evaluates code-lines and skips everythign else. While it might seems like a same thing, it is not! There is a certain inversion and slight difference because of that apparently subtle difference. For instance, sine but code is ignored, this lets one use org-mode as a kind of annotation tool or organisational tool for the code. Normally the parser would choke and produced error messages if it was feeded with org headings and so n. Another possibility is to maybe be able use elisp as a template or annotation language or code generator for some other languages. For example one could write a C code and use elisp macros or code generators which expand to C after eval-buffer, kind -of what org-mode does, but it would maybe make it easier or open some more possibilites if one combines org-mode with directly evaluable elisp. Don't know, haven't had time yet. Anyway, I hope you can give it a try and discuss the idea not the implementeation, implementation is just a sketch to give you something to play with. It is unnecessary to theorycraft essays about all kind of space problems before one tries it, in my opinion. Cheers ________________________________ Från: arthur miller Skickat: den 21 december 2019 17:03 Till: Stefan Monnier Ämne: Sv: Sv: Sv: Sv: Christmas wish: Literate Elisp > I personally would oppose these few-lines of new code in lread.c at > least until this new feature is properly supported in the rest of the > Elisp-manipulating tools we have (starting with the byte-compiler, but > including checkdoc, autoload, ...) and until there's some clear evidence > that it's useful (i.e. used by more than one person). Completely agree on that one. Unfortunately the time and effort and my struggle to just patch bytecompiler.el to do this tells me I am not the right person to jump on implementing "the skip" approach you suggest. Maybe some code, or at least approach used in bytecompiler and eval can be even reused for this, but to me personally it would take too much time and effort. The other approach of copying file to temp buffer and modifying the file is certainly less jobb and easier to implement. I also agree that it is suitable for small toys and demo examples. It couldn't be difficult to implement, one would need to keep track of balanced paranthesis + some few other small things which isn't very difficult. While I can certainly hack elisp to a degree, I am still not the right person to implement something you would distribute in Emacs anyway, so if somebod else is interesting to implement this approach it would be great.