Subject: bug#21472: 25.0.50; REGRESSION: (emacs) `Coding Systems' uses curly quotes for Lisp strings

From: Eli Zaretskii <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 16 Sep 2015 10:23:42 +0300

> Date: Tue, 15 Sep 2015 16:48:07 -0700 (PDT)
> From: Drew Adams <[email-masked]>
> 
> > Emacs handles three different conventions for how to separate lines in a
> > file: newline (Unix), carriage-return linefeed (DOS), and just carriage-return
> > (Mac).
> > 
> > which avoids the quoting issue entirely.
> 
> That fixed sentence looks good to me, FWIW.

It doesn't look good to me.  "Unix" is not used here in a literal
sense, it stands for all Unix-like systems (a.k.a. "Posix"), including
GNU/Linux.  Likewise, "DOS" stands for MS-DOS, MS-Windows, and similar
systems.

Removing the quotes here changed the meaning.

That's also the problem with many other changes Paul made: where
previously a quoted "FOO" frequently meant "like FOO, but not really
FOO", now we have just the literal FOO, and the reader is none the
wiser.

Shame on us for failing to write good expressive English for fear of
quotes.