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Re: forward-comment doesn't (quite) match its documentation
From: |
Alan Mackenzie |
Subject: |
Re: forward-comment doesn't (quite) match its documentation |
Date: |
25 Nov 2001 13:08:14 +0100 |
Date: |
Sun, 25 Nov 2001 12:07:59 +0000 |
User-agent: |
tin/1.4.5-20010409 ("One More Nightmare") (UNIX) (Linux/2.0.35 (i686)) |
Miles Bader <miles@gnu.org> wrote on Sun, 25 Nov 2001 03:16:19 GMT:
> none@example.invalid (Alan Mackenzie) writes:
>> I think it would also be a good idea to say something like "This
>> function moves point forward across COUNT _complete_ comments", since
>> if point is already within a comment, forward-comment will move point
>> over neither the head nor tail of it.
> I find it hard to believe that anyone would think otherwise -- almost
> all `relative movement' commands work that way, using only local
> context to do their work (and indeed, doing otherwise doesn't seem to
> make much sense in this case).
I haven't been programming Emacs long enough to absorb this implicit
principle.
> Perhaps if you would give some idea of how you _thought_ it should
> work, it would clarify things...
When I read "this function moves point forward across COUNT comments" I
expected just that. I.e. across things which _are_ comments, not things
which look like comments but aren't. Font lock, for example, seems to
make this distinction.
Now the description implies that if forward-comment can't move across
COUNT comments, it will move over as many comments as possible up to that
number. Therefore I also expected it would move over "half" a comment,
i.e. move from inside a comment to its beginning/end. For example, I
would have expected (forward-comment -1) to move backwards over a C++
comment when point is at the end of the line:
// C++ comment
^ point
Come to think of it, (forward-comment 1) will move over "half" of a
comment at the end of (the accessible portion of) the buffer, and this
also renders my suggested "_complete_ comments" inaccurate. :-(
Here's another version which might be more accurate and more readable:
> - Function: forward-comment count
> This function moves point forward across COUNT comments and any
> preceding or intervening whitespace (backward, if COUNT is
> negative). If it finds anything other than a comment or
> whitespace, it stops, leaving point at the place where it stopped.
> It also stops after satisfying COUNT. Note that forward-comment
> will only regard text as a comment if it sees an appropriate
> comment delimiter at the buffer position it is currently examining,
> and does so even if that text is within a string.
I'm not trying to be a bloody-minded pedant here. The previous
paragraphs are an introspective analysis of what I subconsciously gleaned
from the info page.
> While it's good to have comments be precise, it's also desirable to
> avoid bloating them unnecessarily.
Yes, I understand this. But as somebody relatively new to elisp
programming, I think more precision is called for in this particular
case.
> -Miles
--
Alan Mackenzie (Munich, Germany)
Email: aacm@muuc.dee; to decode, wherever there is a repeated letter
(like "aa"), remove half of them (leaving, say, "a").
- forward-comment doesn't (quite) match its documentation, Alan Mackenzie, 2001/11/24
- Re: forward-comment doesn't (quite) match its documentation, Miles Bader, 2001/11/24
- Re: forward-comment doesn't (quite) match its documentation,
Alan Mackenzie <=
- Re: forward-comment doesn't (quite) match its documentation, Stefan Monnier, 2001/11/25
- Re: forward-comment doesn't (quite) match its documentation, Alan Mackenzie, 2001/11/27
- Re: forward-comment doesn't (quite) match its documentation, Stefan Monnier, 2001/11/27
- Re: forward-comment doesn't (quite) match its documentation, Alan Mackenzie, 2001/11/27
- Re: forward-comment doesn't (quite) match its documentation, Stefan Monnier, 2001/11/27
- Re: forward-comment doesn't (quite) match its documentation, Alan Mackenzie, 2001/11/29
- Re: forward-comment doesn't (quite) match its documentation, Eli Zaretskii, 2001/11/29
- Re: forward-comment doesn't (quite) match its documentation, Alan Mackenzie, 2001/11/29
- Re: forward-comment doesn't (quite) match its documentation, Stefan Monnier, 2001/11/29
- Re: forward-comment doesn't (quite) match its documentation, Alan Mackenzie, 2001/11/29