23.5.6 Syntactic Font Lock

Font Lock mode can be used to update syntax-table properties automatically. This is useful in languages for which a single syntax table by itself is not sufficient.

Variable: font-lock-syntactic-keywords

This variable enables and controls syntactic Font Lock. Its value should be a list of elements of this form:

(matcher subexp syntax override laxmatch)

The parts of this element have the same meanings as in the corresponding sort of element of font-lock-keywords,

(matcher subexp facename override laxmatch)

However, instead of specifying the value facename to use for the face property, it specifies the value syntax to use for the syntax-table property. Here, syntax can be a variable whose value is a syntax table, a syntax entry of the form (syntax-code . matching-char), or an expression whose value is one of those two types.