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

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

Dmitry Gutov wrote:
> Here's a contrived example which can't be fixed without that:
>
> (defun ’‘ (a b c)
>    "It's called `’‘'."
>    (+ 1 2 3))

Yes, and one can come up with other contrived examples that fail even without 
putting curved quotes into the name.  Elisp function names can contain any 
character: apostrophe, grave accent, newline, parenthesis, space, etc., and I'm 
sure many of these other special characters also cause problems in help buffers.

While it might be worthwhile to fix this, it's an independent issue.  If it is 
fixed, I expect you're right that substitute-command-keys will need to be teased 
apart; this is not just because of curved quotes, but also because its other 
substitutions can generate characters that also need special treatment.  If 
someone wants to take on that task, that's great, so long as it doesn't get in 
the way of ordinary use of *Help* buffers.  In particular, users should be able 
to type ‘C-h f length RET’, see this in a *Help* buffer:

   To get the number of bytes, use ‘string-bytes’.

and if they save and later yank this text into a source-code buffer they should 
get what they see, not a bowdlerized version with ASCII approximations.