Re: [Emacs-diffs] master 9ffb6ce 5/5: Quoting fixes in lisp/international and lisp/leim

[Stefan Monnier <monnier@IRO.UMontreal.CA>]

> And to restate my opinion on the matter, since I haven't participated in
> this discussion for a few months: Elisp code should be treated as
> markup.  Markup should be easy to view and enter: and since Emacs' main
> language is English, the markup should be easy to enter in the most
> common English keyboard layout and be easy to read in the most common
> English locale.

I generally agree.  And to restate what I said earlier in more details,
what I'd like to see fixed is:
- `...' quoting is ugly.  This should be fixed in "end user display"
  mostly, tho I don't mind if it's also fixed in the source code.
- The `...' markup (and it is markup) is ambiguous.

So I thought we were going to replace the `...' markup with ‘...’ markup
(which fixes both points at the same time if we assume that we keep
sticking to ASCII quotes for the rest, tho at the cost of using
non-ASCII markup).

But if we start using curly quotes everywhere, then we're back with the
ambiguity, so that's not a good solution.

So maybe a better option is to refine the `...' markup to get rid of
the ambiguity.  E.g.:
- `...' is only considered valid markup if ... doesn't contain any
  whitespace (or some such restriction: it should be a simple rule that
  still accepts most existing uses, especially those where we want to
  place a hyperlink).
- All other occurrences of ` and ' are treated a standalone ASCII chars
  rather than as part of some markup.
  So `C-x C-f' is not valid markup any more (and won't be prettified).
- Introduce some other markup for the more general case.  Maybe this
  should be specific to docstrings, so it can be "somewhat verbose" and
  fairly rich/extensible.

At that point we could imagine rendering docstrings in more refined way
(e.g. using faces rather than curly quotes).


        Stefan