Subject: Re: Lisp problems (maybe emacs) From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.no> Date: 21 Nov 2002 23:23:10 +0000 Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Message-ID: <3246909790346555@naggum.no> * Espen Vestre | "Braindamaged font-lock shit"? It is regexp-based and therefore extremely unintelligent and it also does a stupid, trivial syntax-only highlighting. A more literal interpretation of "braindamaged" is hardly possible. Working with crayons like that just looks amazingly retarded to me. I mean, English is harder to get exactly right than any programming language, but do people need (or get) color highlighting of something trivially based on regexp-matching? No. Font- lock mode is a fancy gimmick because it is trivially possible, not because it is actually useful. | And I'd like to see the still- in-use machine that uses a significant | share of its cpu cycles for font-lock-mode! That is not the point. The point is that complaining about the CPU time it takes to do font-locking is more than the CPU time it would take to scan back to the beginning of the buffer to count match parentheses, and if you use the font-lock nonsense, the buffer already has that information pre-computed. So it is an argument against the relative expense of the mechanism that was sacrificed while another very wasteful technology was adopted. -- Erik Naggum, Oslo, Norway Act from reason, and failure makes you rethink and study harder. Act from faith, and failure makes you blame someone and push harder.