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Re: how to turn off automatic curly-quoting?


From: Paul Eggert
Subject: Re: how to turn off automatic curly-quoting?
Date: Mon, 3 Aug 2015 14:06:41 -0700
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:38.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/38.1.0

On 08/03/2015 12:33 PM, Drew Adams wrote:
Without context it's hard to know just what is the fix in each case.

They're all doc strings in the Emacs source code. You can find them with 'grep -r'. The three functions and variables in question are custom-add-see-also, calendar-iso-to-absolute, comint-inhibit-carriage-motion. These are just examples of course.

I don't see `ISO year' in either the Emacs manual or the Elisp manual.

The manual is a different topic. Its info and PDF files switched to curved quotes some time ago (this is in Emacs 24.5). Its source files continue to quote `like this'. None of the stuff in this email thread affects the manual or how it's edited or displayed.

The use of "..." for anything other than code strings is also a bad idea, IMO.

That's a style issue. Other GNU projects often use American-style straight double-quotes when quoting ordinary English text "like this", and use British-style straight apostrophes when quoting code '(like this)'; this style is simple and easy to explain and you'll see quite a few instances of it in Emacs too. However, for historical reasons Emacs often quotes English text and/or code with grave accent and apostrophe `like this'.

If I could wave a magic wand and change the Emacs style to resemble that of other GNU projects, without offending existing developers, I'd do it. Unfortunately no magic wands are available and in the meantime we need to deal with the quoting that Emacs code actually uses.



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