Re: Upcoming loss of usability of Emacs source files and Emacs.

[Tassilo Horn <tsdh@gnu.org>]

Oleh Krehel <ohwoeowho@gmail.com> writes:

>> My view is that the curly quotes should not replace 0x60 and 0x27 in
>> our sources, but that the option to display them as curly quotes
>> should be made available to those that want it.
>
> I completely agree. I often search sources using "`" and "'" in a
> regex. Now it's hard to type that in.

I also like `foo' better because it's easy to type and looks good
(although that might be just a matter of habit).  But there are also
packages which exploit that convention.  For example, Gnus will
recognize that `forward-sexp' denotes a function, highlight it
appropriately, and make it clickable.  The `...' notation has only been
used for writing down variables and functions whereas single quotes
could also be used for prose which would at least give more false
positives if Gnus were adapted to the new convention.

> Additionally, I actually like to see "`" and "'" displayed. So if
> there was an option to turn off "‘" visually, I would do it in my
> config.

Ditto.  I was shocked when info started using single quotes and thought
it was an error at first.  It just looked wrong to me.

> ;;* When a documentation string refers to a Lisp symbol, write it as
> ;;  it would be printed (which usually means in lower case), with
> ;;  single-quotes around it.

But we're still referring to a function argument `foo' as FOO in
docstrings, no?

BTW, is there something better for inserting single quotes as using

  M-x insert-char LEFT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK RET
  M-x insert-char RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK RET

?  That's a littlebit inconvenient given that you have to do that quite
often.  (Yes, of course everybody has her own `quote-symbol-at-point'
function anyway.)

Bye,
Tassilo