GNU bug report logs - #23425
master branch: `message' wrongly corrupts ' to curly quote.

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From: Paul Eggert <eggert <at> cs.ucla.edu>
To: Alan Mackenzie <acm <at> muc.de>
Cc: Glenn Morris <rgm <at> gnu.org>, 23425 <at> debbugs.gnu.org
Subject: bug#23425: master branch: `message' wrongly corrupts ' to curly quote.
Date: Fri, 2 Jun 2017 14:47:42 -0700

On 06/02/2017 02:02 PM, Alan Mackenzie wrote:
> How about transferring this discussion to emacs-devel, so that more
> people would be able to see it.

We had that discussion there already, and I doubt whether it’d be 
worthwhile to repeat it. Of course you're free to take it there again if 
you like.

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

I expect that most of the practical problems have been shaken out 
already with the changes published in Emacs 25.1 last year, so that most 
of this cost has already been paid.

> 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.

That kind of approach was proposed way back when. It doesn’t address 
quotes in doc strings, though. More generally, a problem with this sort 
of approach is that although it simplifies ‘message’ (obviously), this 
is at the price of complicating everything else. I estimate we’d need to 
change 10,000 lines of Emacs source code to make that change to 
‘message’. (This is a just a quick estimate based on ‘grep '".*`.*"'’.) 
The resulting source code would typically be a bit harder to read than 
it is now.

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