Re: forward-comment and syntax-ppss

[Alan Mackenzie]

Hello, Clément.

On Wed, Dec 07, 2016 at 05:23:42PM -0500, Clément Pit--Claudel wrote:
> On 2016-12-07 17:04, Alan Mackenzie wrote:
> > You haven't seen "many" issues about syntax-ppss?  One is enough, if
> > it's bad enough. Read up on bug #22983.  

> Thanks, Alan.  I remember reading this long thread a while ago, though
> some of the stuff I had trouble following.

> Stefan and you are in a better position than I am to assess the
> significance of that issue.  The only data point that I can share is
> that I've found multiple packages to be broken by narrowing, to the
> point that I don't use narrowing any more.

That's tragic.  You clearly wanted to use narrowing, yet some bug, quite
likely to be #22983, made narrowing such a bad experience that you
stopped using it.  Did you raise any bug reports for these failures?

> Instead, I use a less invasive solution with two invisible overlays
> covering 1..(beginning of narrowed region) and (end of narrowed
> region)..(buffer-size).

Narrowing isn't "invasive", whatever that means.  It's such a natural and
useful feature that it's surprising other editors haven't got it too.
It's the pertinent bug (likely to be #22983) which has screwed up code
when narrowing is used which is at fault, not narrowing itself.

> Some packages use (point-min) when they really mean 1 (or, if one
> prefers, (save-restriction (widen) (point-min))), ....

I prefer a simple 1 myself.

> .... and things start breaking in the presence of narrowing; so
> basically, I don't really expect things to work smoothly when I use
> narrowing, and so I don't use it.

If things stopped working for me with narrowing, I'd be over the top with
rage.  I use narrowing all the time.  I think it's time to fix some bugs,
and hopefully persuade you that narrowing _can_ be used usefully.

> Clément.

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).