write your own emacs mode

[Joerg Schuster <js@cis.uni-muenchen.de>]

Hello,

I "wrote" (i.e. copied and manipulated) an emacs mode with the help of
the following site:

http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl/GenericMode

My mode is called grammar-mode, because I use it for editing linguistic
grammars of a certain type. grammar-mode works fine except for one
thing: It uses to mark strings of a certain form as expressions of
type X, although I did not define type X anywhere in the code of
grammar-mode. (Example: Strings that are enclosed in quotes are
displayed with font-lock-string-face. Yet, in the type of files which
I use grammar-mode for, strings of the form '^".*"$' are not
wellformed expressions of any type.) How can I prevent this?

Another question: Is there a (not too complicated) way to replace the
face names like "font-lock-type-face" and so on by more direct
descriptions of the face (e.g. "blue")?

Jörg



;;;;; Here is the code ;;;;;;;;;;;;

;; grammar-mode
(define-generic-mode 'grammar-mode
  '("%")
  '("adj" "adj4" "adj5" "adjB" "adjb" "adjc" 
    "adjs" "adv" "advb" "advc" "advs" "advv" 
    "advw" "be" "cnj" "cnjK" "cnjS" "det" "deto" 
    "detw" "en" "eng" "have" "infp" "intj" "n" 
    "n4" "ne" "nem" "ng" "nm" "prep" "pron" 
    "pronj" "pronl" "prono" "pronq" "pronw" 
    "tok" "v" "vC" "vD" "vG" "vG3e" "vI" "vP" 
    "vV")
  nil
  '(".syn$")
  nil
  "Major mode for editing grammar files as used by pm and skonk.")

(defvar grammar-mode-keywords
  '(("[A-Z][^ ]*" . font-lock-type-face)                ; syntactic category
    ("=[a-zA-Z0-9]+" . font-lock-string-face)           ; surface form
    ("_[a-zA-Z0-9]+" . font-lock-string-face)           ; base form
    ("\\^[a-zA-Z0-9]+" . font-lock-string-face)         ; semantic category
    ("[\*\+\?]" . font-lock-function-name-face)         ; *,+,?
    (":" . font-lock-warning-face)))                    ; head symbol

(font-lock-add-keywords 'grammar-mode syntax-mode-keywords)