Re: [Emacs-diffs] master 9ce1d38: Use curved quotes in core elisp diagnostics

[Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de>]

Hello, Chad.

On Tue, Aug 18, 2015 at 11:32:36AM -0700, Chad Brown wrote:

> > On 18 Aug 2015, at 11:05, Andreas Schwab <schwab@linux-m68k.org> wrote:
> > 
> > Paul Eggert <eggert@cs.ucla.edu> writes:
> > 
> >> And here we are in 2015, with the quote problem still only partly fixed.
> > 
> > In 2015, people use `...`.


> I work more in prose now than in code, and I’ve received numerous
> complaints from editors in the last ~3 years about text that uses
> that. In practice, its currently hard for me to type that exact
> string, because all of the programs I use that aren’t Emacs or some
> of the terminal console interfaces automatically turn it into ‘…’.

Yet, for lots of programming languages, it is essential to be able to
type `, ', and even ....  (That's three dots followed by a full stop!)

> I’ve mostly given up on using Emacs for long-form prose work for
> this reason (which is too bad, because the editing support for prose
> is still quite good, and also long-since pushed down into muscle
> memory).

It seems what you're missing in Emacs is some sort of "literary mode"
which would make the translations you need.

When you say "still quite good", this gives the impression of a steady
diminution of quality, which hasn't yet dropped below some sort of
threshold.  Is this what you actually mean?

> With all this in mind, I’ve been watching these exploding threads with
> a mixture of hope and dread, because the modernization effort would be
> very nice for me, but I’m seeing a lot of older people whose opinions
> and efforts I respect argue for "just use old-style ascii quotes."

I think you may have misunderstood what the controversy is about.  It's
not about adding or not adding support for curly quotes and curly
ellipses in users' documents.  It's about whether or not to replace `
and ' in Emacs's source files' error messages and comments with curly
quotes, for a perceived aesthetic benefit, at the cost of making those
files more difficult to maintain, particularly in environments which
aren't X-windows.

> I hope that helps. Thanks again to Paul for trying to push Emacs forward. 

We're _all_ trying to push Emacs forward.  It's just we sometimes don't
fully agree what direction forward is.  :-)

> ~Chad

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).