From maintainers-request at octave dot org Mon Jan 24 13:00:54 2005
Subject: Octave emacs lisp gobbledy-gook
From: "John W. Eaton" <jwe at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu>
To: Daniel J Sebald <daniel dot sebald at ieee dot org>
Cc: maintainers at octave dot org
Date: Mon, 24 Jan 2005 14:04:45 -0500

On 15-Jan-2005, Daniel J Sebald <daniel dot sebald at ieee dot org> wrote:

| As you can probably tell from the subject, I've been frustratingly 
| trying to get my xemacs editor to properly load the octave-mod.el file.  
| To this point, I've managed to get the lisp file to load in emacs.
| 
| This is with Fedora Core and it's emacs setup.  (If there is anyone out 
| there who has managed this, please let me know.)  The most recent 
| discussion in the archive is Aug 2004 initiated by Jon Stickel.  I'm 
| running 2.1.64 which is December.
| 
| Part of the problem was chasing, perhaps, outdated documentation.  In 
| the source for 2.1.64 of the emacs subdirectory in the octave-mod.el 
| file it says:
| 
| To begin using this mode for all `.m' files that you edit, add the
| following lines to your `.emacs' file:
| 
|   (autoload 'octave-mode \"octave-mod\" nil t)
|   (setq auto-mode-alist
|         (cons '(\"\\\\.m$\" . octave-mode) auto-mode-alist))
| 
| However, both of the those commands seemed to cause errors in emacs.

Those lines are part of an Emacs Lisp string, so they contain extra
quoting for the " and \ characters.  If you start the Octave mode and
then run C-h m to get help for the mode, you will see

  To begin using this mode for all `.m' files that you edit, add the
  following lines to your `.emacs' file:

    (autoload 'octave-mode "octave-mod" nil t)
    (setq auto-mode-alist
	  (cons '("\\.m$" . octave-mode) auto-mode-alist))

I think this will work even if Emacs already defines an autoload for
you.

jwe