Re: text-quoting-style

[Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de>]

Hello, Richard.

On Tue, Sep 01, 2015 at 06:55:42PM -0400, Richard Stallman wrote:
> [[[ 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. ]]]

>   > And text-quoting-style is no solution for you either, since Emacs's
>   > source code and many other documents will still come with those pesky
>   > thingies.

> There should not be curly quotes in Emacs source code on a regular
> basis.  They might appear the definition of 'format-message' and/or
> 'prettify', but those are very special cases.

> Are there currently curly quotes in other places than that?

$ grep '?' *.[ch]
, where ? is the left curly quote (entered by holding down <AlgGr>
whilst typing 2, 0, 1, 8 on the numeric keypad), in our src directory
shows 20 matches.  Most, possibly all, of these seem to be to do with
the manipulation of the curly quotes themselves.

$ find . -name '*.el' | xargs grep '?' | wc -l
show 985 matches for left curly quote in the lisp source files.  I find
this concerning.

Curly quotes aren't on any standard keyboard layout.  The general notion
of how you're meant to edit files containing them is to enable a minor
mode whereby typing ` or ' sometimes does self-insert-command, other
times inserts a curly quote.  isearch is being modified so that
(?sometimes) entering ` or ' in the search string will match the
curlies.

I don't find these workarounds at all attractive.

> -- 
> 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.