Re: [Emacs-diffs] master 9ce1d38: Use curved quotes in core elisp diagnostics

[Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org>]

[[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
[[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
[[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]

We could let the first argument to 'format'
be a symbol that specifies how to transform the format string.
Then the second argument would be the format string.

This feature would naturally propagate to 'message' and 'error'.

So you would write

  (format 'ascii-quotes
          "`add-to-list' can't use var `%s'; use `push' or `cl-pushnew'" sym)

and it would convert the quotes according to the display.

Or

  (format 'single-quotes
          "'add-to-list' can't use var '%s'; use 'push' or 'cl-pushnew'" sym)

and it would convert the quotes according to the display,
treating odd-numbered singlequotes as open-quotes.

You can take your choice, because either one will DTRT on all displays.
The specified symbol's 'format-transform' property should be a
function that makes the change.  This way, many such transformations
can be implemented.  A list of transformation symbols would mean to
make several of them.

This avoids all the disadvantages you were talking about.


-- 
Dr Richard Stallman
President, Free Software Foundation (gnu.org, fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (internethalloffame.org)
Skype: No way! See stallman.org/skype.html.