multi-character parentheses in syntax table

Question

I know that I can have multi-character comment delimiters, but how about multi-character parentheses, e.g. if I wanted to treat the character sequence "%{" as an opening parenthesis and "}%" as a closing one like this

%{

}%

Answer 1

Emacs does not support this, see the info entry for syntax tables. Comments (and strings) have matching delimiters - but they also have corresponding "generic" syntax classes. The parenthesis class doesn't have similar support.

So, you're stuck with only single character parentheses.