Re: master ff4de1b: Fix quoting style in Lisp comments

[Dmitry Gutov]

On 16.09.2021 15:53, Eli Zaretskii wrote:

> > I agree with using '...' in plain text files, like NEWS and PROBLEMS.
>
> If this discussion indicates something it's that "plain text" is open
> to interpretation, so if we will have a mandatory convention, we'd
> need to come up with an explicit list.  E.g., NEWS and PROBLEMS are by
> default in Outline mode, not in Text mode, so someone could claim they
> aren't "plain text".

They are not program code. But they can have excerpts.

> > .el/.c files are not plain text files, they are source code files, and I
> > do not agree that we have to (or should) change the convention from
> > `...'  there.  At least not until we have fixed our tool chain to
> > respect '...'  in .el/.c files -- and if we decide to move to '...', we
> > should do so everywhere in those files: Both doc strings and comments.
>
> Well, we already have hundreds of quotes 'like this' in both Lisp and
> C files, so if highlighting that is a problem, let's work on that,
> because reverting all those hundreds of quotes sounds like a lot of
> code churn.  (Btw, C and Lisp are not the only programming languages
> we use in Emacs sources, is the above valid for all the source files?)

Are you arguing toward having multiple standards or no standard at all?

I just did a search across .el files:

  rg --type lisp ';.*?[^=]\'[a-z][a-z_-]{6,}\''

results in 199 lines, a lot of which are "plain" quotations by 
themselves, e.g.

test/lisp/so-long-tests/so-long-tests.el:
364:  ;; is 'preserved' by default (using both options).
498:         ;; will validate the 'reverted' state against this.  (Note

or

lisp/vc/pcvs.el
85:;;    add support for parsing 'modules' file ("cvs co -c")
97:;; - write 'cvs-mode-admin' to do arbitrary 'cvs admin' commands

which don't require changing. Others refer to symbols but not global 
symbols (and thus don't benefit from code completion/navigation support 
so much), so not using proper markup could be excused.

Either way, that is less than 200 examples, easy enough to undo.

For comparison,

  rg --type lisp ';.*?[^=]`[a-z][a-z_-]{6,}\''

Reports 10691 lines.

> > I don't think the ` character is "ugly" -- that Markdown (for
> > instance) uses it for similar purposes (but as `...`) shows that
> > it's a character that people are comfortable with using in
> > semi-structured non-plain-text files like source code files.
>
> We've had this argument, and I'd prefer not to have it again.
> (Markdown is not really relevant because `...` does not display with
> these characters.)

Where doesn't it display with these characters? In the source files? Yes 
it does.

But like Stefan K. said, we could choose font-lock rules to have them 
displayed however you want. That's not the issue.