🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <BILL.92Jun24132115@cortex.nsma.arizona.edu>, bill@nsma.arizona.edu (Bill Skaggs) writes:
> It would be extremely useful for Emacs to provide support for
> developing major modes capable of doing formatting based on the
> contents of a file. 

This is possible with Epoch currently, it would just be _very_
painful.

> Less ambitiously, C mode could be rewritten to display comments in an
> italic font and function headers in bold; LaTeX mode could display
> formatting commands in a different color, etc.

This already exists and is in use. In fact, I think that there are
several independent packages to do this. I know we built one in house
and there is at least one NIH package (which, to be honest, works
better).

I was at the Emacs BOF at the X conference a couple of years ago and
this very same topic came up (surprise!) and lead to a somewhat
rancorous debate that settled nothing. The same two camps arose
(embedded controls vs. pure text). Of course, the _real_ solution is a
better file system that allows you have parallel "data segments" in a
file (ala multiples files but grouped together by the OS and easily
handled as a unit by things such as cp). Barring this, I personally
favor the Epoch (pure text) solution as it is backwards compatible.
Too many other programs depend on a pure text stream.

-- 
Alan M. Carroll          "Weren't there yams involved, too?" - J. Ockerbloom
Epoch Development Team   
Urbana Il.               "I hate shopping with the reality-impaired" - Susan