On 09/25/2017 12:03 PM, Alan Mackenzie wrote:
> At the moment, there is a single known example in the Emacs lisp code

There are plenty of examples other than the one you noticed in 
cc-engine.el. For example, here's one in shell.el's 
shell-dirstack-message function:

    (message "%s" msg)

MSG is a string containing directory names followed by spaces, and the 
"%s" avoids translation of directory names that happen to contain grave 
accents or apostrophes (or percents, for that matter). This is a common 
programming technique in Emacs source code, and has been for decades.

> I will be unhappy if the text around the cross references
> doesn't state that the translation of quotes can be inhibited.  Without
> that, the documentation of each function would be incomplete and
> fragmented.  "To influence or inhibit this translation of the quote
> characters, see xxxxxx." would do.

Sure, that's easy. Revised patch attached.

> How about merging this change into emacs-26 anyway, now?

I now see one minor error in the scratch/customize-quotes patch, which 
is that its etc/NEWS file incorrectly states ", except that 
'text-quoting-style' no longer affects the treatment of curved quotes in 
format arguments to functions like 'message' and 'format-message'", a 
phrase that appears to be a stray leftover from an earlier version of 
your proposal. The attached patch fixes that, and also has been rebased 
to apply after the scratch/customize-quotes is merged in, so I suggest 
that you merge scratch/customize-quotes and that I then apply the 
attached patch.