Re: APL mode

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Rustom Mody writes:
 > On Sat, Oct 12, 2013 at 7:56 PM, Stefan Monnier <address@hidden> wrote:
 >> RM wrote:

 >>> What does sexp mean for non-lisp languages like C etc?

 >> It means "a subtree in the abstract syntax tree".

 > In principle, that's fine. However in practice there are things like
[...]
 > c. (most important) emacs doesnt really do a full-scale context
 >    free grammar analysis does it?

If you use the semantic package, it can.  Most simple modes don't,
although use of semantic is becoming more common.

 > So I guess I am asking: Emacs uses regular exps to fudge a
 > semblance of context free structure. How does it do this?

Either it uses semantic, or it mixes regexp "parsing" with use of
regexps to match lexical tokens and custom lisp to parse.