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Emacs 24.4 made an incompatible change to interpreter-mode-alist, treating its members now as regular expressions and no longer as simple strings (http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/emacs.git/commit/?id=1af4c2203ce7954c089133234ba80e6272ce9458). I want to replace:

(add-to-list 'interpreter-mode-alist
             ;; Match php, php-3, php5, php7, php5.5, php-7.0.1, etc.
             (cons "php\\(?:-?[3457]\\(?:\\.[0-9]+\\)*\\)?" 'php-mode))

(which works fine with Emacs 24.4 and newer) with compatibility code that, depending on the version of Emacs, adds either a regular expression or strings.

What is the preferred way to test if the Emacs version in use is 24.4 or newer? (if (version< emacs-version "24.4") …)?

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5
  • Using emacs-version with the version* functions is sane, yes.
    – phils
    Sep 7, 2017 at 2:33
  • You may also be interested in playing with version-list-... and version-to-list; e.g., (unless (version-list-<= (version-to-list emacs-version) '(25 2 50 1)) ...)
    – lawlist
    Sep 7, 2017 at 5:51
  • @phils: Could you please post your answer as an answer? You can use my code at github.com/scfc/php-mode/commit/… to mirror the code in the question.
    – Tim Landscheidt
    Sep 8, 2017 at 4:17
  • @lawlist: Thanks, that's interesting. For my use (simple) case, I'll stick with version<.
    – Tim Landscheidt
    Sep 8, 2017 at 4:18
  • @TimLandscheidt, sure; done.
    – phils
    Sep 9, 2017 at 4:02

1 Answer 1

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12

Using emacs-version with the various version* functions is sane, yes.

  • version=
  • version<
  • version<=

(These are convenience wrappers which use the version-list functionality behind the scenes.)

By way of example, the following is the code Tim ended up using:

(if (version< emacs-version "24.4")
    (dolist (i '("php" "php3" "php5" "php7" "php-5" "php-5.5" "php7.0.1"))
      (add-to-list 'interpreter-mode-alist (cons i 'php-mode)))
  (add-to-list 'interpreter-mode-alist
               ;; Match php, php-3, php5, php7, php5.5, php-7.0.1, etc.
               (cons "php\\(?:-?[3457]\\(?:\\.[0-9]+\\)*\\)?" 'php-mode)))
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1
  • 1
    n.b. The variables emacs-major-version and emacs-minor-version were also mentioned in another answer (which has unfortunately been deleted), and these might be useful alternatives in some situations.
    – phils
    Sep 9, 2017 at 4:07

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