eho@clarity.Princeton.EDU (Eric Ho) (09/14/89)
Just wondering if anyone has written web-minor-mode that will recognize web constructs in a programming language's comments ? The reason I mention this with minor-mode is that one wants to use all the existing excellent editing facilities found in all major-modes (e.g. Lisp-mode, C-mode, C++-mode, Emacs-Lisp-mode, ...etc...) and yet add extra goodies to add/delete/change/browse all web-related stuff. In other words, in order to accomplish this, one must be able to 'hide' all web constructs as that particular programming language's comments -- i.e. you've ordinary comments (as in /* ... */ in C or ;;; in Lisp) and smart comments (e.g. /* ....@.... web constructs here .... */). And the web-minor-mode should be smart enough to recognize them. In particular, it should be able process say a region or the entire buffer and then strips all ordinary comments and recognize all smart comments, process them and send the results (along with the user's code of course) to ctangle (or any Spiderweb-generated tangle for that particualar programming language you're using) and maybe from there to 'make' or whatever. In other words, ctangle sees a perfect web file even the buffer is a Lisp or C buffer. This way, you enjoy the best of both worlds (i.e. C-mode, Lisp-mode, ..etc.. ) as far as editing is concerned and you don't need to write another major-mode (or worst, a separate major-web-mode for each programming language) and you don't need to change anything tangle nor weave. Of course, one can always write separate filters and simple pipe a region of the buffer to the shell and let those filters do all the stripping and then send the output to ctangle (or whatever) but filters won't help you to jump around web constructs in a Lisp or C buffer. Oh well, just a thought. -- Eric Ho Cognitive Science Lab., Princeton University voice = 609-258-2987 email = eho@confidence.princeton.edu 609-258-2819 (messages) eho@bogey.princeton.edu regards. -eric-