GNU bug report logs - #20385
Support curved quotes in doc strings

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Message #74 received at 20385 <at> debbugs.gnu.org (full text, mbox):

From: Drew Adams <drew.adams <at> oracle.com>
To: Eli Zaretskii <eliz <at> gnu.org>, Dmitry Gutov <dgutov <at> yandex.ru>
Cc: 20385 <at> debbugs.gnu.org, eggert <at> cs.ucla.edu
Subject: RE: bug#20385: [PROPOSED PATCH] Support quoting 'like this' in doc
 strings
Date: Wed, 22 Apr 2015 06:52:16 -0700 (PDT)

I will add that one increasingly important use of `...' is that
doc gets copied and pasted to other, non-Emacs environments.

You might think that `...' is "ugly" (and that is the ONLY
reason that's been given so far for changing it), but it has
the distinct advantage that it is a unique way of quoting
that separates itself from both strings ("...") and ordinary
text quoting (curly quotes, double and single).

If you post doc pieces into a context such as Stack Exchange,
for example, you need only change the ' in `...' to `, to
have that new context also, like Emacs, treat the quoted
sexp specially - not a ordinary quoted text.  That is, SE
uses `...` instead of `...', but it does the same thing
Emacs does, to make the result stand out as code and not as
just any old quoted text.

If you change `...' to ordinary curly quoting, you lose
distinguishing what it quotes as code.

Just one more consideration, another reason why the proposed
change is a bad idea, IMHO.

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