Re: What is a word?

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Florian Lindner <mailinglists@xgm.de>
> Date: Tue, 12 May 2015 21:55:44 +0200
> 
> ofter I find it, that the emacs function acting on a word not behave like I 
> expect.
> 
> I'm not sure if the definiton of a word is major-mode dependent?
> 
> Talking about kill-word, forward-word and alike.
> 
> Example, | represents cursor position, shell-script mode:
> 
> cd $BASE| -> backward-kill-word cd $|
> ;; what I expected
> 
> cd $| -> backward-kill-word -> |
> ;; not what I expected, rather expected only the $, with or without the 
> whitespace between cd, same for "cd .."

Each major mode defines its own word-constituent characters.  In
general, any character that can appear in a symbol recognized by the
programming language of the mode is a word-constituent character in
that mode.

So "word" has different meanings in different major modes.  For
example, the '-' character is word-constituent in Lisp, but not in C.