Re: Parens in column 1 equals defun fiasco

Matt Tucker <tuck(a)whistlingfish.net&gt; writes: There was no preceding discussion, Stephen simply mentioned it, and everyone knows what's it about anyway. OK, just kidding. :-) The problem is pretty much described in the subject: an open parenthesis in the first column makes XEmacs syntax analyzer think that it's the beginning of defun. This fools the indentation functions, font-lock, etc. The results are disastrous; take this Tcl code: doc_body_append "<form method=GET action=foo> [export_form_vars foo bar baz] Please write your name: <input type=text name=person_name> " Because of the square bracket that precedes `export_form_vars', font-lock will think that here a defun (?!) begins, and the rest of the file will be colored as a string, except for the actual strings, which will be colored as code. Lovely to behold. I'll leave the explanation of the internals to someone who understands them (Jan?), which is why I asked the question anyway.