Re: Heuristics for: is a major-mode a "programming language" mode?

[Stefan Monnier]

> Not sure if this will help, but in current emacs 24, there is note in
> the NEWS file about a new mode called prog-mode, which is supposed to be
> a parent mode for programming modes. I believe the supplied prog modes
> in emacs have/are being updated to be derived from this mode. 

Indeed, this prog-mode should provide just the info that Ilya needs,
except that:
- it'll be new in Emacs-24.1, so it's not a good solution for "right now"
- only some of the major modes distributed with Emacs have been updated
  to use it, as of now.  Hopefully by 24.1 they will "all" have been
  adapted.
- non-bundled programming modes probably take a lot longer to start
  using it.

In the mean time, for modes bundled with Emacs, a good heuristic could
be to try and find the file from which the mode was loaded and then see
if that file is in "lisp/progmodes/" or elsewhere.  And of course that
will have some false positives (e.g. inferior-process interaction modes)
and false negatives (lisp-mode.el which i still in lisp/emacs-lisp).
And then come the ambiguous ones, like sgml-mode and latex-mode which
can be considered both as programming modes and text modes (they
currently inherit from text-mode only, tho).


        Stefan