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

From: Paul Eggert <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 15 May 2015 18:48:53 -0700

Dmitry Gutov wrote:
> how about switching to Markdown-style quoting, then?
> That's definitely going to be familiar.

Familiar to those who know Markdown, yes.  However, English quoting is more 
familiar to English writers, and far more people know English than know both 
English and Markdown.

> will elisp-completion-at-point detect that point is inside the Hungarian quotes

It could easily do so, in a Hungarian locale.  The characters are programmable.

> that's... weird.

It's not weird.  It's ordinary English markup.  It's "weird" only to Emacs and 
TeX users accustomed to oddball quoting `like this' that exists mostly because 
of a historical accident.

> The end result, visually, would be the same.

We don't care only about what appears in Emacs after one types C-h.  Emacs is 
more than just a documentation viewer; it's a tool for editing documentation, 
and to those of us who write documentation (or who view Elisp source code, etc., 
etc.) what we see on the screen when we're editing is important.  (Otherwise 
we'd probably be editing SGML by hand, eeeyyyucckkk.)