Re: Structural regular expressions

[Eric Schulte]

Tom <address@hidden> writes:

> Lennart Borgman <lennart.borgman <at> gmail.com> writes:
>> 
>> Looks indeed like a useful idea. I suggest adding a new function
>> argument PREDICATE to query-replace-regexp etc. (Think of the argument
>> PREDICATE in completing-read.)
>> 
>
> It can be a good start, but the feature in the E editor is more general
> than search and replace. You can perform any operation on the selected 
> text. It's sort of like working on the narrowed part of a buffer, only 
> the narrowed part in this case consists of several separate ranges of 
> the same buffer (like all comments, etc.).

Would generalizing the narrowing behavior to arbitrarily many ranges in
a buffer instead of a single range have extensive ramifications?  Would
this be an easy or difficult thing to implement?

If it's not too difficult then providing behavior like that mentioned in
the article above should be trivial.

Cheers -- Eric

hmm, it seems that `narrow-to-region' works by changing the bounds (min
and max indices) of the current buffer, not something that naturally
generalizes to multiple regions.