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

From: Dmitry Gutov <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 15 May 2015 22:09:20 +0300

On 05/15/2015 09:54 PM, Paul Eggert wrote:

> That's an independent issue: it can be done no matter what quoting
> regime the source code uses.

Terrific. Then there's no need to worry too much about the diagnostic 
messages.

> I'm not that worried about the cost of implementation now.  I'm worried
> about the long-term cost of having a quoting regime that requires
> documentation and explanation.

What's there to explain? Quoting will work as before, it'll only be 
displayed differently (and users could even opt out of that).

> It's simpler and easier to explain if
> the doc string looks the same in the UI as it does while you're editing
> it.

My "lambda"s have been rendered in Greek for quite a while. We even have 
a minor mode for things like this now.

> For example, you can easily cut and paste from the UI into the doc
> string source when composing a new doc string, which is something that
> doesn't work well for either GCC or Coreutils.

Why wouldn't that work in Emacs either way?

The only place that seems like it'll have this problem is the Info 
buffers, but they have a lot of other markup that looks differently in 
the source anyway.

>> - Using unicode for markup is a complication (e.g. with certain mail
>> clients, but some other instances might come up).
>
> It's a complication we already have, as we already use UTF-8 in a few
> doc strings.  For example, the documentation for prettify-symbols-mode
> uses UTF-8 curved double-quotes.

Does it? I can't find that.

But either way, allowing unicode in sources (why we do, obviously) and 
using unicode characters as ubiquitous markup are two very different things.

> Nor do I.  This is a transition process, with the long-term goal of
 > quoting via quotes rather than via grave accent and apostrophe.

If we use rendering via font-lock, there will be no transition process.