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

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From: Nicolas Petton <nicolas <at> petton.fr>
To: Drew Adams <drew.adams <at> oracle.com>
Cc: eggert <at> cs.ucla.edu, Eli Zaretskii <eliz <at> gnu.org>, 20385 <at> debbugs.gnu.org, Dmitry Gutov <dgutov <at> yandex.ru>
Subject: bug#20385: [PROPOSED PATCH] Support quoting 'like this' in doc strings
Date: Wed, 22 Apr 2015 15:59:37 +0200

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Drew Adams writes:

> 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.

I agree with you.

Maybe a compromise could be to add as an alternative syntax `...` (just
like SE or Markdown)? It would then fix the unbalanced quotes issue.

Nico
-- 
Nicolas Petton
http://nicolas-petton.fr

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