Problems setting up Xemacs Octave-mode

[John W. Eaton]

On  8-Sep-2008, Terry Duell wrote:

| Hullo All,
| I guess there must be specific help about this somewhere, but blowed if I  
| can find anything that appears suitable for my situation.
| I found the following ...
| 
| "The Emacs package EOS consists of the three files `octave-mod.el',  
| `octave-inf.el', and `octave-hlp.el'. These files, or better yet their  
| byte-compiled versions, should be somewhere in your Emacs load-path.
| If you have GNU Emacs with a version number at least as high as 19.35, you  
| are all set up, because EOS is respectively will be part of GNU Emacs as  
| of version 19.35.
| Otherwise, copy the three files from the `emacs' subdirectory of the  
| Octave distribution to a place where Emacs can find them (this depends on  
| how your Emacs was installed). Byte-compile them for speed if you want."
| 
| Problem is that I don't seem to have an 'emacs' subdir in my Octave  
| distribution, and have only been able to find 'octave-mod.el', no sign  
| anywhere of the Emacs package EOS, or at least nowhere my searches have  
| taken me.

The emacs subdirectory is in the Octave source distribution.  People
who make binary packages may include it in a separate package, or not
at all.  For example, Debian has a separate octave3.0-emacsen package
that contains the Emacs Lisp files.

| Octave has been installed from a Fedora 8 x86_64 rpm (Fedora updates  
| repository), and it is installed in '/usr/share/octave' which is bereft of  
| an 'emacs' subdir, so unable to use the above instructions.
| 
| I did find advice on mods to make to my '.emacs' file in order to invoke  
| octave mode, and placed 'octave-mod.el' my  
| '/usr/share/xemacs/site-packages/lisp/' dir and added suggested mods...

Where did you find the octave-mod.el file if it was not part of your
distributions files?

| (autoload 'octave-mode "octave-mod" nil t)
| (setq auto-mode-alist
|        (cons '("\\.m$" . octave-mode) auto-mode-alist))
| 
| to my '/home/terry/.xemacs/custom.el' file, but when I load a 'xxx.m' file  
| into xemacs it doesn't understand the mode and issues the following  
| error...
| 
| 'error in file mode specification: wrong number of arguments:  
| define-abbrev, 6'
| 
| So, I obviously have some/all things wrong.

There are some incompatibilities in the functions provided by GNU
Emacs and XEmacs.  I guess octave-mod.el is expecting to be able to
pass more arguments to define-abbrev than the XEmacs define-abbrev
function accepts.  However, the octave-mod.el file that is currently
part of Octave's source tree only calls define-abbrev with 4
arguments.  So again, where did you get your copy of octave-mod.el?
If it was from GNU Emacs, then I'm not surprised that it fails.

| If anyone is successfully running octave mode using Xemacs on Fedora 8,  
| please point me in the right direction.

I don't know precisely what needs to be done to make it work with
XEmacs.  The Octave mode files are included in GNU Emacs now, so if
you use that, then you don't need to do anything special.  If you must
use XEmacs, then perhaps an XEmacs user can provide some additional
help.

jwe