Subject: Re: bug#23425: master branch: `message' wrongly corrupts ' to curly quote.

From: Alan Mackenzie <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 2 Jun 2017 21:02:09 +0000

Hello, Paul.

On Wed, May 31, 2017 at 16:26:12 -0700, Paul Eggert wrote:
> On 05/31/2017 02:24 PM, Alan Mackenzie wrote:
> > This bug has not been fixed.

> Oh, sorry, I misunderstood your earlier comments. I reopened the bug.

Thanks.

How about transferring this discussion to emacs-devel, so that more
people would be able to see it.

> > The only documentation for this feature is obscure and hidden.  There
> > is nothing in `message''s doc string which explicitly states likely
> > unwanted replacement of characters takes place; just a puzzling
> > "exception proves the rule" paragraph.

> I installed the attached patch into master, which I hope makes that doc 
> string sufficiently clear. I'd rather not change the Emacs default 
> behavior, though, for reasons already discussed.

The default behaviour has been changed already, and that change has
caused problems and will cause further problems.

I propose restoring the default to what it was in Emacs 24.  For
simplicity's sake, only % should be special, and for translating quotes
we could introduce %' and %`, such that quote translation happens only
when a %' or %` is present.

This would solve the problem in an elegant and consistent way, would
enable quote translation to happen, yet would avoid users of literal
quote characters getting caught up in unwanted quote translations.

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).