Subject: RE: Request for highlighting back-quote/quote pair notation.

From: "Drew Adams" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 19 Dec 2012 09:49:08 -0800

> So `' quoting style is common for info files. I checked it 
> was used for function selection in libc and readline info files.
> Also it was used in GNU Make, R, Autotool and other manuals.
> 
> So having highlighting for `' in info mode is good thing for 
> Emacs user (compare with emacs-lisp-mode, where it was highlighted).
> 
> This is my vote up.

Here is a 2004 thread about this, for reference:
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2004-10/msg00045.html

Be aware that it is not feasible for such highlighting to be foolproof.  There
are sometimes isolated occurrences of characters such as ` and " that do not
indicate quotation bounds, for instance.  And some nested or overlapping
quotations are not handled correctly, such as this from `(eintr) else':

  `"It's a tiger!"'; but when you evaluate `(type-of-animal 'zebra)',
  you will see `"It's not fierce!"'.

However, last time (2004) I checked in detail, there were "only *4* nodes of the
Elisp Manual that exhibit any highlighting problem at all, and those pbs are
minor.  This is a big manual."  That's not bad.
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2004-10/msg00197.html

At that time I also checked other manuals, with the findings detailed here:
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2004-10/msg00206.html
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2004-10/msg00234.html

A subsequent version of the code fixed some of those problems.
Here is my last message in that thread:
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2004-10/msg00301.html

Among other things, this highlighting can be helpful in finding certain bugs in
the manuals.  During that thread several such bugs were found and corrected.