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

[Paul Eggert]

Wolfgang Jenkner wrote:
> I'd think that "common modern practice" for GNU projects is described in
> (info "(gettext) po/LINGUAS").
>
> IIUC, the description there recommends that the usual "ugly" quotes
> should be used in source files and translated at run time according to
> the locale.

gettext caters to C and that part of its manual makes sense for languages like 
C, because portable C programs can't easily put non-ASCII characters into string 
literals and C programmers don't have a practical alternative to putting "ugly" 
quotes of some sort into their string literals.  This sort of uglification isn't 
necessary for Emacs Lisp, though.

If Emacs were to use gettext, presumably it would wrap every English-language 
diagnostic in a call to gettext, even diagnostics that don't involve quotes. 
For example:

  (format (gettext "Buffer %S has a running process; kill it? ")
          (buffer-name (current-buffer)))
  (format (gettext "‘add-to-list’ can't use var ‘%s’") sym)
  ...

We'd also need ask the Translation Project to maintain a set of translations for 
all the Emacs diagnostics.  This would work regardless of the quoting style used 
in the source code, and would be a good project to do, if someone wanted to do 
it.  It'd be a much bigger project than fixing quoting, though, as the set of 
changes involved to Emacs would be more complicated than the above simple 
examples suggest.