Re: A simple solution to "Upcoming loss of usability ..."

[Paul Eggert <eggert@cs.ucla.edu>]

Dmitry Gutov wrote:

>> But if we want to
>> use font-lock to alter how quotes are displayed, these heuristics won't
>> work well, as they'll fail to alter many quotes that they should alter.
>
> Why do you think so? We can alter any quotes we want using font-lock too.

Whatever heuristics we use are likely to be wrong for many real-world uses in 
Elisp code.  Many uses of grave accent in Elisp strings, characters, and 
comments are intended to be grave accent, not left quote.  Similarly for 
apostrophe and right quote.  It's unlikely that any easy-to-explain heuristic 
based on font-lock will distinguish among the uses reliably.

 >> Yes, I would like the markup to head that way.  But the Emacs source
 >> docstrings have largely not needed to change, and there's no need to
 >> change them right now.
 >
 > That's sneaky wording. You obviously want them to change.

There was no intent to be sneaky.  I don't see how one can interpret my remarks 
in any way other than saying that I would like the markup to change eventually.