Re: master ff4de1b: Fix quoting style in Lisp comments

[Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de>]

On Fri, Sep 17, 2021 at 23:21:41 +0700, Yuri Khan wrote:
> On Fri, 17 Sept 2021 at 19:32, Gregory Heytings <gregory@heytings.org> wrote:

> > Except that doing this throws the baby out with the bathwater.  If
> > some think it looks ugly, it is IMO better to make it look better,
> > instead of stopping to use it.  Because it's much easier to parse
> > (as a pair) than double apostrophes.  It's a historical accident
> > that ASCII included paired {} () [] <>, but no paired quotation
> > marks.

> It’s a historical accident that the typewriter character set conflated
> the opening single quote, closing single quote, apostrophe, acute
> accent, and single prime. It is also a historical accident that the
> grave accent ` was born as a separate spacing character at all — and
> that is why I, among others, consider it ugly. Both these accidents
> are canonically fixed by Unicode.

Unicode is just a code.  To say it's a fix for the current problems is
to make a category error.  What you're really saying is that some
Unicode decorative (as opposed to functional) characters solve this
problem.  They don't, precisely because they're only decorative
characters.

> In my opinion, it is a mistake to avoid Unicode characters for the
> reason that some terminals cannot display them.

In my opinion, it's a good reason to avoid these impractical characters,
but not the most important one.

> Teach those terminals to map them to dumb quotes instead. Also, if
> Unicode quotation marks are hard to enter, push for better keyboard
> layouts.

This is the killer.  These decorative quote marks aren't merely hard to
enter, they're near to impossible on a qwerty (or similar) keyboard
layout.  This is a marked inconvenience to me when reading Info manuals.
I used to be able to search for the `marks' around symbols.  Since the
TexInfo people started using decorative characters, I can't do this any
more.

I can't type these characters.  More to the point, I can't refer to them
after other people have typed them.  Their introduction would signal a
loss in productivity and and increase in irritation for Emacs
developers.

The thing to alter, as Gregory said, is the appearance of the ASCII
characters on the terminals of those who find them annoying.

> (Personally, I have all of “”‘’…–—«»°®©™≤≥§−±×÷≈ in my AltGr layer.)

I only have characters there I need only rarely.

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).