GNU bug report logs -
#20385
Support curved quotes in doc strings
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Reported by: Paul Eggert <eggert <at> cs.ucla.edu>
Date: Mon, 20 Apr 2015 18:40:04 UTC
Severity: wishlist
Tags: patch
Done: Paul Eggert <eggert <at> cs.ucla.edu>
Bug is archived. No further changes may be made.
Full log
Message #262 received at 20385 <at> debbugs.gnu.org (full text, mbox):
Dmitry Gutov wrote:
> What if the locale mandates the use of some other kind of quotes? Then copying
> and pasting won't work anyway.
Yes it will. It'll work fine. If a documentation string is in (say) Hungarian,
a user will be able to paste quoted Hungarian text into it, and the text will
carry its Hungarian quotation marks along. It'll be just like documentation in
English and with English quotes.
> I've never had a need to copy a diagnostic message with the
> intention to paste it into the source code.
Shrug. I've done it. And vice versa. And there are other examples. The point
is that it's simpler and nicer if cutting and pasting Just Works.
> Actually, it's a decent argument against using *any particular locale's*
> quoting, in order not to confuse casual contributors, who'd have to know that
> *these* fancy quotes will be localized, but *those* - won't.
No, there's normally no need to localize those curved quotes, not if the text is
English and uses English quoting. The only time one would need to localize is
for obsolete displays lacking curved quotes, which casual contributors are
unlikely to be using nowadays anyway.
> Maybe you could paste quotes, but not any other kind of formatting.
First, that's not true: many other kinds of formatting (though obviously not
all) can also be cut and pasted from info into .texi files. Second, even if it
were true it'd be OK. One improvement at a time. Quotes are such a common kind
of formatting that simplifying their cutting and pasting is worth doing even if
we can't simplify all forms of formatting.
> And you can notice that if we delimited docstrings with curly quotes instead of
> the straight quotation marks, tildify-space wouldn't have been able to use them
> exactly this way inside the docstring.
That's not a significant problem, as it applies to any convention that uses only
paired quotes. For example, the current documentation for
skeleton-pair-insert-maybe says "These are (), [], {}, <> and `' ...", and the
reader needs to infer that those instances of ` and ' are not quotes, but are
characters. This sort of thing happens every now and then in documentation, and
it's no big deal.
> I know of no serious markup language that utilizes unicode, even now.
Texinfo does. Unicode curved quotes are part of the markup. They affect
spacing among other things.
> I don't see it as clunky
That's the main point of disagreement here. Although Emacs old-timers are used
to quoting `like this', to newbies it's a weird and offputting relic from
ancient history.
This bug report was last modified 9 years and 364 days ago.
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