Font lock (Was: Re: Text properties slow down XEmacs)

Jan> The big question is: can font-lock.el be improved wihtout Jan> changing the interface to programs too much. Have yous seen the `scheme-lock.el' thing that I did? Please have a look; it's very short, only a couple screenfuls. It lets you set the font lock keywords and highlighting expressions using the customize interface, and the changes take effect immediately. If C mode had that, it would be easy to add special highlighting expressions on the fly, like one that would turn: /* This function can garbage collect */ ... or ... // Fixme: ... bright red. I imagine extensions where you could attach an extent property too; perhaps a function name, and that function gets passed the filename and line number, so it can look in a .NOTES file to pop up a programmer note or reminder of some kind. (I guess it would have to use diff's context strategy when line numbers change.) That's the sort of thing you'd want in a sitewide options file; so that a person acting as a project coordinator or what have you could set that up for everyone, and there could be a shared database of notes to one another about whatever is needed to be discussed about a piece of code, documentation, or web page.