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Re: [Emacs-diffs] master b533552 2/5: Documentation fixes re quotes


From: Dmitry Gutov
Subject: Re: [Emacs-diffs] master b533552 2/5: Documentation fixes re quotes
Date: Thu, 3 Sep 2015 18:38:11 +0300
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:40.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/40.0

On 09/02/2015 04:05 AM, Paul Eggert wrote:

More generally, though, I did not remove every single curved quote from
the tutorial.  That is because it's fine if some programmers want to use
curved quotes in docstrings and diagnostics.  These quotes have worked
for many years, and they now work even a bit better than they did
before, in the sense that they're now markup that is automatically
converted to grave quotes for old-fashioned users who prefer the grave
style.

They aren't markup, because you insist that they "stand for themselves", which is as far from the concept of markup as it could be.

Using curved quotes in the source has technical advantages, as
the programmer sees the same quotes that typical users will see in the
next version of Emacs, which is a clear win.

Nothing clear about that. Programmers are used to even larger levels of abstraction than quote translation. Which is relatively trivial.

or help buffers that quote `like this' in older Emacs versions, but
overall in many cases the benefits exceed the costs and it is a win

[citation needed]

As far as the Emacs source code goes, because the master for a while had
an approach that required the use of curved quotes for proper markup,
and because I was using Electric Quote mode where it's easier to type
curved than straight quotes, I converted some diagnostics and
documentation source to use curved quotes.

Even though you've been specifically asked not to.

Most (though not all) of
these curved quotes can now be converted back to grave quotes if someone
who hates, Hates, HATES curved quotes wants to take the trouble to do
that.

Well, that's nice. Thank you for that chunk of pointless work that I (or someone else) will have to do. I take it there are no other things you'd prefer me to spend time on instead.

However, I doubt whether it's worth the effort, as the curved
quotes work fine in practice in the source, and really, why not give
them a try?  In practice they might not be as bad as all that.

The "work fine in practice" argument is weak. A vast number of approaches will work well enough if you don't care about increased complexity (something that Alan brought up), or further improvements that might be built on top of docstring markup.



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