Here is a table of syntax classes, the characters that stand for them, their meanings, and examples of their use.
The class of open parentheses is designated with `(', and that of close parentheses with `)'.
In English text, and in C code, the parenthesis pairs are `()', `[]', and `{}'. In Emacs Lisp, the delimiters for lists and vectors (`()' and `[]') are classified as parenthesis characters.
The parsing facilities of Emacs consider a string as a single token. The usual syntactic meanings of the characters in the string are suppressed.
The Lisp modes have two string quote characters: double-quote (`"') and vertical bar (`|'). `|' is not used in Emacs Lisp, but it is used in Common Lisp. C also has two string quote characters: double-quote for strings, and single-quote (`'') for character constants.
English text has no string quote characters because English is not a programming language. Although quotation marks are used in English, we do not want them to turn off the usual syntactic properties of other characters in the quotation.
Characters in this class count as part of words if
words-include-escapes
is non-nil
. See section Motion by Words.
Characters in this class count as part of words if
words-include-escapes
is non-nil
. See section Motion by Words.
This class is used for backslash in TeX mode.
English text has no comment characters. In Lisp, the semicolon (`;') starts a comment and a newline or formfeed ends one.
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