🚀 go-pugleaf

Many of my Fortran programs make use of the C preprocessor to get
around some of Fortran's limitations. This works fine, but I do have
some problems editing such files with Emacs in Fortran mode. Whenever
a subroutine contains preprocessor directives (starting with a # in
the first column), it can't be indented with META-CTRL-Q; reformatting
stops with the error message "No comment syntax defined".

The easiest solution seemed to me to tell Emacs to ignore such lines
alltogether, i.e. treat them as comments (my setup is such that
comments are never modified in Fortran mode). After a short look
at fortran.el (I am by no means an Emacs-Lisp expert!) I decided that
adding # to the first letter group (Cc*) in comment-line-start-skip
should suffice; however it didn't have the desired effect. Now I still
get the same error message, but in addition all preprocessor directives
are indented to column 6!

Does anyone know
1) Why my solution doesn't work?
2) What can be done to really solve this problem?

Konrad Hinsen (hac041@zam001.zam.kfa-juelich.de)