bug#20385: Support curved quotes in doc strings

[Ivan Shmakov]

>>>>> Dmitry Gutov <dgutov@yandex.ru> writes:
>>>>> On 05/13/2015 06:13 PM, Paul Eggert wrote:

[…]

 >> That's been proposed, but nobody has taken the time to do it.  Plus,
 >> it'd be One More Thing; it's simpler if doc strings are plain
 >> strings and are not little subsets of Markdown or whatever.

 > That's trivial, if there's agreement to do it. I don't really
 > understand the motivation for the original proposal (to switch away
 > from `...'), so it's not clear to me if font-locking would satisfy
 > it.

        That’s simple: the ` character is not a quotation mark at all.
        In fact, it’s the spacing variant of the very same diacritical
        mark as is shown above e in è.

        The rationale was that one can encode ‘è’ as ‘e\010`’ if there’s
        no “native” è character in the target (ASCII-based) encoding.
        Just like one may encode “bold” and “underline”; consider, say:

$ printf 'b\b_o\b_l\b_d\b_ u\bun\bnd\bde\ber\brl\bli\bin\bne\be\n' | less 

        The very same trick that up to this day is used by man(1).

[…]

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