Re: [Emacs-diffs] master 9ce1d38: Use curved quotes in core elisp diagnostics

[Dmitry Gutov]

On 08/17/2015 07:42 PM, Paul Eggert wrote:

> You mean, instead of this:
>
>     (message "Buffer ‘%s’ is read only." buf)
>
> we do this:
>
>     (message (concat "Buffer "uLSQM"%s"uRSQM" is read only.") buf)

Alternatively, `format' could grow format sequences that output quotes. 
The main options are: %lq and %rq, or %qs (like GCC uses). In the latter 
case, it would be used like this:

(message "Buffer %qs is read only." buf)

or

(format "See also %qs." 'car-safe)

Looks rather clean to me, but requires explicit intent on the part of 
the caller. Which seems like another benefit to me.

> By the way I considered many other possibilities, and you're welcome to
> bring up other alternatives you're interested in.  Maybe we can come up
> with something better.  The point of this change is to fix a real
> problem, after all, not to stir up trouble.

Honestly, the problem seems a lot less real to me than it does to you 
(like 1 out of 5). Failing to address it in a satisfactory manner, 
means, to me, that the work should be reverted, not blaze ahead.

But, of course, the sunk costs are considerable now, and one would 
resist backpedaling just because of that.

> No, just the grave accents in strings and comments, and any matching
> apostrophes; this is a considerably lighter touch than what the above
> remark implies.

This might seem like a fine distinction to you (and it does indicate 
smaller odds of typing something wrong in the actual source code), but 
that's exactly what I meant.

The discussion started with a certain fraction of developers disliking 
the idea of using curly quotes as markup, and that's where 
electric-quotes-mode leads.