Syntax based recognition of comments


Hello,

I'm writing some elisp code that needs to scan a line of text and
count opening and closing parentheses. All of it is based on the
syntax table (parens actually are curly braces). I can test for parens
with char-syntax, which returns ?\( and ?\). That's fine.

My problem is with comments, which of course have to be skipped. Even
though the syntax table is ok (at least font-lock thinks so), it
appears that there is no way to learn via char-syntax that a character
is the first character of an opening comment sequence.

So what's the "canonical" way to recognize comments? Should I use
looking-at and comment-start/comment-end? Is there any way to access
syntax table info? I would prefer to stick with syntax-based scanning
and avoid having to use variables containing regexps (and duplicate
mode-specific information).

Also, it looks like forward-comment can use the syntax table. My
problem is to find when to call it... Am I missing the obvious?

Thanks in advance for comments and ideas.

-- Alain.
.

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