🚀 go-pugleaf

To whomever is interested:

I was the original implementor of the c++-mode.el that is (I am given
to understand) to be included in version 19 of gnu-emacs.  Back a few
years ago when I did that I ran into some problems that still remain
problems.  I thought I would see if someone knowledgeable wished to
comment.

I originally thought the task was going to be easy: just take c-mode
and tweak it a bit.  Well, it's almost that simple, bug not quite.
The big catch is the introduction of comments that begin with "//" and
end with the next newline in C++.  In the doc string for
'parse-sexp-ignore-comments' it says

  If comments are terminated by newlines,
  you must make this variable nil.

Pretty direct.  Since we have comments terminated by newlines in C++,
this must be nil.  Unfortunately, this has an unpleasant side effect:
parse-partial-sexp will now look at the bodies of comments.  At least
one effect of this is that "'" can no longer be a string delimiter.
If it is, then code like this

   foo(bar,
       // Don't do this!
       baz)

will not match parens correctly when the close paren is typed, since
it will think it's still within a string.  And, in fact, paren matching
will be messed up for the rest of the file.  So, I made "'" a
punctuation character and lived with it.  I forgot the reason for this
(and didn't write it down anywhere), so someone pointed out a year
later that "'" should be a string delimiter, so I mistakenly changed
it back for a while before I remembered the reason.  Just today
someone else has pointed out the same mistake.  Can anyone think of
any way around this?  It seems like it would be nice if
parse-sexp-ignore-comments didn't have to be nil when newline-ended
coments were in use.  But I imagine there's good reasons for it.

Thanks!

Dave

P.S.  I hope I've chosen the appropriate group for this message.