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

[Dmitry Gutov <dgutov@yandex.ru>]

On 08/02/2015 09:56 AM, Paul Eggert wrote:

> 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.

But we have an escaping syntax! Yet, Elisp doesn't know what's escaped 
and what isn't, so even this won't help:

(defun ’‘ (a b c)
  "It's called `\\=’\\=‘'."
   (+ 1 2 3))

> 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;

It's also a matter of readability. Take the latest related commit that 
you pushed. Sometime later, someone will come along and wonder: why do 
we need to substitute command keys in widget options? Who would put keys 
in there?

> this is not just because of curved quotes, but
> also because its other substitutions can generate characters that also
> need special treatment.

You might want to give an example. But in general, those characters also 
could have `escaped' put on them. Or `substituted', for instance.

> 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.

As long as that task involves rearranging C code, you're excluding a 
significant portion of Emacs developers from contributing, myself included.

> 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.

First, it's an arbitrary condition that you've set yourself, and we've 
discussed it already. If you asked all Emacs users, I suspect the 
majority won't care, and the rest won't reach a unanimous decision. 
Personally, I'd prefer that ‘string-bytes’, after copying and pasting to 
a "normal" buffer, turned into the original markup, which, in this case, 
is `string-bytes'. But that seems non-trivial to implement.

Second, as long as font-lock isn't used for translation (and we've 
pretty much agreed that it won't), why wouldn't a Lisp solution work 
like you describe?