Re: AW: font-locking and open parens in column 0

[Richard Stallman]

    > Emacs is looking for an open-paren at top level in list structure.

    When?

Since around 1975.

           We're talking about a patch to beginning-of-defun, right?
    Beginning-of-defun has until now been defined by regexps.

I don't think we are talking about the same question.
beginning-of-defun has a customization feature involving regexps, but
that isn't the point I'm talking about.  I'm talking about what it 
actually did, which (normally) was to find an open-paren in column 0.

You asked what I meant by heuristic and I explained it to you.

    > The heuristic is to take an open-paren at column zero and assume
    > it is at top level.

    The docstring of beginning-of-defun doesn't say anything about "toplevel".

So what?

    AFAIK beginning-of-defun is a function in the same category as
    forward-paragraph and things like that, which do not care much about the
    global syntax state, but instead only pay attention to the immediately
    surrounding text.

That is not how I think of it.

The original definition was to look for an open paren at top level.
But that was too slow, so I established the convention of assuming
that an open paren in column 0 would be taken as top level even if it
was not really at top level.