Subject: bug#31597: 27.0.50; Annoying ' to ’ translation

From: Alan Mackenzie <[email-masked]>
Date: 27 May 2018 09:32:15 -0000

Hello, Helmut.

In article <[email-masked]> you wrote:
> Executing this command:

>  emacs -Q -batch -eval "(error \"can't parse input\")"

> prints

>  can’t parse input

> I would expect to see "can't parse input" instead.

> Had I wanted to see a "can’t parse input" in the output, I would have
> written "can’t parse input" in the source.  Emacs should not do this
> translation by default; this new behavior is a misfeature.

Yes.  It's a misfeature indeed.  It's already caused a lot of bad
feeling amongst Emacs developers.  The person behind the change, Paul
Eggert, simply pushed it through without first securing agreement from
Emacs as a whole, and had the political skills to prevent a consensus on
the matter prevailing.  I think he regards it as "modern and desirable"
to display what he thinks the programmer wanted, rather than what the
programmer actually wrote.

As for actually polling users, such as yourself, first?  Hmmm.

> It's extremely annoying that the behavior of such basic functions as
> error and message has changed so drastically from previous Emacs
> versions.  People who like this automagic translation should be forced
> to customize text-quoting-style not the people who want the traditional
> and much more predictable behavior.

Yes.  But no, such a strategem would be "incompatible" with the way
things were when rushed through for Emacs 25.  I did my best to make the
nil value of text-quoting-style mean "do nothing", but was overruled,
again on grounds of "compatibility".

So, you're not the first to suffer from this misfeature, and you'll
certainly not be the last.  I think it vanishingly unlikely that it will
be fixed.

Sorry.

> In GNU Emacs 27.0.50 (build 1, x86_64-pc-linux-gnu, GTK+ Version 3.22.11)
>  of 2018-05-07 built on caladan
> Repository revision: 6e362a32bc9d21f73a0f29ca6f45481edeea6f29
> Windowing system distributor 'The X.Org Foundation', version 11.0.11902000
> System Description: Debian GNU/Linux 9 (stretch)
> Configured using:
>  'configure --with-xpm=no --with-gif=no --with-tiff=no --with-jpeg=no
>  --without-pop'

> Configured features:
> PNG SOUND DBUS GSETTINGS NOTIFY GNUTLS LIBXML2 FREETYPE XFT ZLIB
> TOOLKIT_SCROLL_BARS GTK3 X11 THREADS LIBSYSTEMD

> Important settings:
>   value of $LANG: C.UTF-8
>   locale-coding-system: utf-8-unix

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).