Re: Escaping quotes in docstrings, Was: A simple solution to "Upcoming loss of usability ..."

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

>> For us to go there, could you please make substitute-command-keys add the
>> `escaped' property to the escaped characters in its output? And push it to
>> scratch/quote-escaping.

I've done that, and have discovered a couple of problems.

First, a doc string that contains \[foo] is supposed to generate a key 
description for 'foo', derived by calling (key-description 'foo).  But 
key-description can return a string that contains quote marks, and in general 
some of them should be escaped and others should not be.  It's not clear to me 
whether both possibilities can occur in doc strings, but the situation is worrisome.

Second, and more generally, the overall approach seems error prone.  It asks 
programmers to mark every quote character that should not be transformed.  But 
characters can come from many different sources, and it's hard to keep track of 
each place that can insert user data of some sort.  In contrast, it's easy to 
find grave accents in doc strings, to fix the relative few that aren't already 
transformed automatically, and to not worry about user data.