Re: master ff4de1b: Fix quoting style in Lisp comments

[Amin Bandali <bandali@gnu.org>]

Dmitry Gutov writes:

> On 17.09.2021 14:11, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
>>> Cc: monnier@iro.umontreal.ca, stefan@marxist.se, juri@linkov.net,
>>>   rudalics@gmx.at, larsi@gnus.org, emacs-devel@gnu.org
>>> From: Dmitry Gutov <dgutov@yandex.ru>
>>> Date: Fri, 17 Sep 2021 13:44:34 +0300
>>>
>>> On 17.09.2021 09:34, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
>>>> E.g., I dislike the decision to remove
>>>> facemenu and its useful (for me) key bindings: should I now start a
>>>> lobbying thread explaining time and again why that should be reverted?
>>>> There's no end to this, and it is not a reasonable way to manage the
>>>> project development.
>>>
>>> If people come out en masse and say they want the face menu back, we
>>> should seriously consider it.
>> How many are "en masse"?  We have less than a dozen people claiming
>> they want `..' back, that's hardly a "masse" in my book.
>
> I don't see anybody concur with your stance in this particular
> discussion, and if you search the old one, I think it was mostly Paul
> (?), and even he was really arguing toward something different, in a
> different context as well (plain text files).
>
> Unlike some other questions, this is about the development process,
> and the team of regulars is not so big. A dozen people seems like a
> significant number for that purpose.

I acknowledge that this ship seems to have sailed (though my personal
preference would be a reconsideration of the choice, and it seems like
several other regulars here want that as well) and I may not have a
say in it now (the long discussion in 2015 predates my involvement
in/around Emacs and emacs-devel), but if I may voice my opinion now
that I /am/ around and somewhat active, I prefer `...' over '...'.
It's a quoting style familiar from several other GNU projects I have
been around and/or use -- e.g. M4, Guile, ... -- and to me it's always
been a welcome uniqueness (if one may call it that) compared to the
rest of the software world, and I enjoy seeing it in docstrings,
comments, changelogs, and so on.

I've used a large number of fonts over the years, and don't see what
the supposed 'ugliness' of the ` is (as others have pointed out, it's
already used by various markups like the popular Markdown, and doesn't
seem to be problematic there).  For pretty-printed documentation and
manuals it's nice that ‘...’ unicode quotes are used for display, but
as mentioned they are not supported everywhere and are not as easy to
type.  I believe `...' is a nice ASCII dual of that, one which we've
already been using in Emacs for years.  I find that the opening and
closing characters being different gives me a pleasant, visual cue
about the start and end point of a quote.  Sure, it may be different
to what programmers are typically used to, but I don't think that
makes it any less useful or would be justification enough to throw it
out the window.

In short, I really like this ASCII typographic `hack' and find it
useful; and I like several of the points other folks -- like Phil --
have made in favour of not abandoning it. :)

>>> Just like with any other change, especially those that are relatively
>>> easy to undo.
>> This one isn't, because we have been using it for many moons now.
>> Some of it is practically impossible to undo, because it's in Git
>> commit log messages.
>
> Again, look at this discussion: nobody is disputing the format of log
> messages.
>
> Lars said we shouldn't care about it too much, but that's neither here
> nor there.

Yeah I don't think we'd need to 'undo' anything in the commit logs.
Those are there to stay, but much could be done in etc/NEWS and
elsewhere, and in future commit messages.  Also, as folks mentioned,
it's not like people have been exclusively using '...' in commit
messages or plain text files, and `...' is still used quite frequently
(and has been, historically), and I foresee that it will continue to
be.  Considering the long history of development of Emacs, I don't
think it's at all too late to reverse this decision if we'd like to.