Elisp manual, page "Parsing Expression". "Sexp"s are not defined

[Alan Mackenzie]

Elisp manual, v. 2.7 (as supplied with Emacs 21.1).  Page "Parsing
Expressions" in the syntax-table section.

There is no definition of "sexp" or "balanced expression" here.  (These
terms are defined in the Emacs manual's glossary).

In c-mode, with the fragment
aye = bee + see ;
scan-sexps treats "bee" and " + see" as sexps when scanning forwards, but
when scanning backwards, the sexps it finds are "see" and "bee +".  This
seems strange.  Presumably the syntax-table entry for '+' (it's
"punctuation") has a lot to do with this behaviour.

I believe that "sexp" and "balanced expression" should be defined here in
terms of syntax table entries.  This would enable elisp programmers to
predict the behaviour of the functions such as scan-sexps which are
defined on this info page.

-- 
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").