Subject: bug#73404: 30.0.50; [forward/kill/etc]-sexp commands do not behave as expected in tree-sitter modes

From: Mickey Petersen <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 26 Sep 2024 13:13:53 +0100

Eli Zaretskii <[email-masked]> writes:

>> Cc: [email-masked]
>> From: Mickey Petersen <[email-masked]>
>> Date: Thu, 26 Sep 2024 10:56:35 +0100
>>
>> In my opinion, that's not what `sexp' movement is.
>>
>> Sexp movement is movement by balanced expressions -- and a fallback to
>> word-like behaviour absent that -- and this is not that. It would be
>> better to relegate this sort of thing to its own set of keybindings.
>
> The term "balanced expression" is not well defined in languages other
> than Lisp and Lisp-like ones.  It is clear what expected when point is
> on a brace or a parenthesis, but entirely NOT clear when you start
> from something else.  For example:
>
>   int foo = bar + 2 * baz;
>
> Suppose you start with point at "foo": what would you expect
> forward-sexp to do? nothing?
>

I expect it to behave as it presently does: default to word-like
behaviour such as M-@ / M-f etc.

Balanced expression is not well defined, de jure, but it is in
practical terms, making it de facto rather well understood and
supported. It behaves reasonably consistently across languages, and I
use *-sexp commands thousands of times a day in a wide range of major modes and
contexts, both in code and also prose.

Most people who use *-sexp (or *-word commands for that matter) in
major modes come to recognise how they work and know what happens to
the text/point in their buffer before they run them.

I would challenge anyone, given even small samples of code, to do the
same with the current TS only implementation.

>> > We might need to add a user option so people can easily turn off
>> > tree-sitter sexp movement, since it isn’t a strict upgrade from the
>> > generic sexp movement—it’s more of a different flavored sexp movement.
>>
>> It should be opt-in, not opt-out.
>
> I disagree.  Moving by sub-trees is a natural generalization of sexp
> movement for languages where parentheses and braces are rare and far
> in-between.

Yes, if one can intuit the sub trees' structure, which is not so
simple; and if the selection of commands are sufficiently expressive
enough to let you navigate the tree. I am not sure they are.

The CSTs are deep, wide, and nodes' ranges frequently overlap; they
are multi-dimensional structures that map to a simple 2-dimensional
'grid' in your buffer. Making heads or tails of that is no easy feat.