Subject: Re: bug#20385: [PATCH] Support curved quotes in doc strings

From: Dmitry Gutov <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 14 May 2015 01:33:19 +0300

On 05/13/2015 06:13 PM, Paul Eggert wrote:

> ‘again’?  Emacs has been using asymmetric quotes in doc strings
> forever.

I mean that the suggestion was voiced but never sufficiently addressed.

> Or are you referring to the original Bug#20385 proposal of
> straight apostrophes? Stefan wasn't sure he liked that idea, and
> preferred curved quotes.  I'd be happy either way, myself; the point is
> that those grave accents have got to go.

The suggestion to use font-lock was Stefan's as well.

> That's been proposed, but nobody has taken the time to do it.  Plus,
> it'd be One More Thing; it's simpler if doc strings are plain strings
> and are not little subsets of Markdown or whatever.

That's trivial, if there's agreement to do it. I don't really understand 
the motivation for the original proposal (to switch away from `...'), so 
it's not clear to me if font-locking would satisfy it.

Also, will going from `...' to '...' be beneficial enough, provided 
font-lock displays both as curly single quotes? The downsides to this 
are obvious (changing habits, re-training contributors).

"Plain" unicode strings are not that plain, especially if it still takes 
4 keypresses to type the character, and I also need to explain to 
contributors how to do that.

> It looks OK when I use Thunderbird 31.6.0 in Ubuntu 15.04 in an American
> English locale (first attachment).  It's not a thing of beauty,
> admittedly, but it's legible enough.  It looks much nicer under emacs
> -Q, which is what counts (second attachment).

That's not a question of aesthetics.

For some reason still unclear to me (I have English locale and language 
set everywhere I can see), it displays a group of cyrillic characters 
(тАШ) instead of the fancy quotes. Which will complicate reading small 
patches somewhat (ones I wouldn't open in an external program otherwise).