Re: No. 232 - indent-new-comment-line misbehaviour

Andreas Röhler writes: > To start with the less important: some of the routines > in newcomment.el are very intrinsic. Too they contain a > lot of circulars, calling themselves again and > again. This makes debugging labourious. Well, that's usually good Lisp style.

Be careful here. AFAIK newcomment is Stefan Monnier's baby, and he is not famous for being an icky programmer. > Presently it's not easy to detect for the user where a > variable like `comment-column' is set. He or she may > look into newcomment.el, see `defcustom comment-column' > there and customize it. This is in some sense not a problem. C-h v will tell you that the value is an automatic buffer-local, which is almost always a signal that modes use different values for the variable. I suppose M-x customize-variable probably does a sucky job of handling this, but the documentation is there. It might make sense to demote it to a defvar, though. It sounds like this is not a variable that it is very useful to customise. > However, that value might be overridden by > `lisp-mode-variables' which uses a hard-coded value. You should look into using a specifier for this variable. The problem with that is that the interface for using it will change globally, from `setq' and implicit `symbol-value' to `set-specifier' and `specifier-instance'. You'll just about have to rename it, and figure out some way to handle legacy code that uses `comment-column'. And of course it will cause an ongoing cost of sync'ing to GNU Emacs. One possibility would be to have a defvar for `comment-column' which is backward- and GNU-compatible. Then have a defcustom for `comment-column-specifier' which would be consulted by the code that sets comment-column. The main problem with this scheme is that there is no `mode' locale, but it wouldn't be hard to add it, I think. > IMO the right place to put in defcustom-forms for > commenting are the programming modes. So I'll delete > this forms in my new comment.el and introduce it there? Definitely not. A single variable should have a single defcustom, and that defcustom should be in the place where the variable is used, not where it is set. Briefly, it is an interface exported by comment.el. _______________________________________________ XEmacs-Beta mailing list XEmacs-Beta(a)xemacs.org http://calypso.tux.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/xemacs-beta