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

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

Dmitry Gutov wrote:

> That doesn't sound right to me. `key-description' should continue returning a
> plain string.

Perhaps you're right, I haven't looked into key-description carefully enough.  I 
gave it only as an example of the sorts of problems we'd run into.

> since when do button labels have quotes in them?

In customization buffers.

>> In contrast, it's much easier to look through the code for ` inside a
>> string, and mark the exceptional characters that are intended to be
>> quotes and that are not automatically translated already.
>
> Sorry, I don't understand this either. Mark? Automatically translated?

I meant that although normally doc strings are translated and one can quote with 
either grave accent and apostrophe or curved quotation marks and they will be 
translated automatically to the user preferred style, occasionally one wants an 
actual grave accent or curved quotation mark to be output as-is regardless of 
user preference and these exceptional cases need to be marked in the doc strings.

> That would be closer, but the current master implements more in C, which means
> fewer people who can change or maintain the code. And it complicates the API of
> a low-level function (substitute-command-keys), in a way that seems incompatible
> with radically changing the output later.

We can't anticipate radical changes that future maintainers might want to do. 
Worrying about that is likely to lead to overengineering and wasted effort. 
We'll have enough trouble just solving today's problems.

As for whether the implementation should be in C -- some parts have to be used 
by C, since C code generates quoted strings on occasion.  How much should be in 
C vs Lisp is an implementation detail that is no big deal.