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

From: Dmitry Gutov <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 15 May 2015 20:24:00 +0300

On 05/15/2015 10:49 AM, Paul Eggert wrote:

> No, in locales where UTF-8 is allowed these packages typically use
> curved quotes.  Here are GCC and coreutils in my (UTF-8) locale:

On the other hand, you'll be able to dynamically determine which quotes 
to use, depending e.g. on the locale.

>    $ echo @ >t.c
>    $ gcc t.c
>    t.c:1:1: error: stray ‘@’ in program

It still doesn't have the fancy quotes directly in the source code: they 
seem to be generated dynamically, similarly to the suggestion above:

https://github.com/gcc-mirror/gcc/blob/06fa1266fac43778983b3925ad048748297db38c/gcc/c-family/c-lex.c#L526

> Sure, but that's more complicated as it'd mean two ways to generate
> curved quotes.

Neither of those should be particularly hard to implement.

> Another way to put it: we'd still need an easy way for
> users to type curved quotes in strings and once we have that (as per the
> Bug#20545 patch)

I don't see why we'd still need that, but the patch seems generally 
useful either way.

> then why not prefer the same easy way to type curved
> quotes in doc strings?

Two reasons. Neither of them is big, but the improvement from the 
transition to different quoting method is not huge either.

- Using unicode for markup is a complication (e.g. with certain mail 
clients, but some other instances might come up).
- I don't like having two standards for quoting. And if quotes are 
agumented with font-lock, all the existing Elisp out there will be 
displayed with modern quotes automatically.