bug#703: Octave comments in emacs

[Chong Yidong]

Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> wrote:

> > Is there a way to assign two different syntax rules for the same
> > character in emacs? Ie, one where ' is treated as a string quote
> > (and suppresses the syntax elements inside the quotes), and one
> > where it is treated as a suffix operator.
>
> Yes, there is, using the `syntax-table' property.  A common way to set
> this property is via the font-lock-syntactic-keywords variable.
>
> So all it takes is a regexp good enough to distinguish the two cases

Kurt Hornik <Kurt.Hornik@wu-wien.ac.at> wrote:

> Octave mode has never provided syntax support for single quoted
> strings because there is no way (short of actually parsing the code)
> of telling these apart from single quotes used for transposition.

Maybe we could use a rough heuristic to handle most of the cases.  A '
character that occurs before "[=(] *" is probably the beginning of a
single quoted string, not a transpose operator.  WDYT?