Re: [Emacs-diffs] master 9ffb6ce 5/5: Quoting fixes in lisp/international and lisp/leim

[David Kastrup]

Oleh Krehel <address@hidden> writes:

> And to restate my opinion on the matter, since I haven't participated in
> this discussion for a few months: Elisp code should be treated as
> markup. Markup should be easy to view and enter: and since Emacs' main
> language is English, the markup should be easy to enter in the most
> common English keyboard layout and be easy to read in the most common
> English locale.

DOC strings are only marginally cooked and contain code examples.  Code
examples obviously contains ' and ` in their Lisp meaning.  Code
examples are copied&pasted into actual code.

So if ` and ' are supposed to be "markup" for ‘ and ’, we obviously need
a markup variant for either code passages or unmolested ` and '.

Has anything like that been proposed?  I repeat the documentation help
from the `quote' macro:

    quote is a special form in ‘C source code’.

    (quote ARG)

    Return the argument, without evaluating it.  ‘(quote x)’ yields ‘x’.
    Warning: ‘quote’ does not construct its return value, but just returns
    the value that was pre-constructed by the Lisp reader (see info node
    ‘(elisp)Printed Representation’).
    This means that ’(a . b) is not identical to (cons ’a ’b): the former
    does not cons.  Quoting should be reserved for constants that will
    never be modified by side-effects, unless you like self-modifying code.
    See the common pitfall in info node ‘(elisp)Rearrangement’ for an example
    of unexpected results when a quoted object is modified.

It contains both quote marks as well as Lisp quote characters.
Executing the given examples yields "void variable ’"&"Trailing garbage
following expression" and "void variable ’a" respectively.

Info does not have this problem because Texinfo markup marks code
passages separately, and for those, ` and ' are not substituted.

So this just can't work in DOC strings until we have decided on separate
markup for either ` and ' or code in general.

-- 
David Kastrup