Re: etags for mfiles?

[John W. Eaton]

On 11-Nov-1998, Francesco Potorti` <address@hidden> wrote:

| Hi, I am the maintainer of etags.
| 
| John Eaton wrote:
|    I don't think it's off topic.  Unfortunately, I also don't know of
|    anyone who has modified etags/ctags/?tags to parse Octave .m files.
|    If anyone is interested in working on a project like this (or has
|    already done so) please let me know as I think it would be a useful
|    addition for Octave and Emacs.
|    
| I think that adding native support to etags for octave files is overkill,
| as the code posted by Mario Storti is good for the job.

If so, then I agree.  I guess I am way out of date (or I was never up
to date to begin with) because I didn't realize that you could specify
the regexps to match on the etags command line.  I had also not
thought about whether it would be possible to generate useful tags
just by using some regexps.

| What I said above may not be true for two reasons:
| 1) if the "function" keyword and the function name are on different lines,
|    the tag cannot be generated with the current etags regexp mechanism;

This doesn't happen in the Octave sources, but it could happen if you
have a very long list of returned values and wanted to keep the line
length under some limit.  In any case, I don't think it happens very
often, so it is probably not worth worrying about.

| 2) if many of you think that it would be useful for etags to know about .m
|    files by default.

Probably not, if the tags generated by the code that Mario posted
works well enought.

| If I  am convinced, I  will schedule inclusion  of support for .m  files in
| etags (don't hold your breath) and will accept code that implements that or
| write  it myself.   Otherwise,  I'll  include Mario  Storti's  code in  the
| examples section of the etags  manual that comes with Emacs.

If it is OK with Mario, I'll also included it in the Octave manual.

Thanks,

jwe