Re: forward-sexp when on a floating point number

[Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>]

>> Hopefully at some point syntax-tables will be extended to FSM
>> (currently, they're trivial FSMs where you always get to a final state
>> after exactly one transition) so we can make them understand such
>> lexical details.
> Except that not everyone will want this.  I still think that fancier movement
> like this should be done (at least initially) in an ELPA package for those who
> want it, rather than request a change to the behavior of Emacs core.

Lexing via FSM is "standard" in the world of computer languages, so I'm
pretty sure it'd be good/useful to add such functionality to Emacs's core.

E.g. it would improve performance and robustness of many SMIE tokenizers.

Whether the functionality is added by extending syntax-tables or as
a new thingy is of course up for debate.

And whether the user-facing commands should change semantics is also up
for debate.  But that's an orthogonal debate.


        Stefan