Re: quotation marks [was Re: TUTORIAL.de updated]

[Paul Eggert <eggert@cs.ucla.edu>]

On 01/19/12 23:49, Alan Mackenzie wrote:
> What about displaying Elisp source code on ASCII-only platforms?

This is not a new problem.  The Elisp source code in the Emacs trunk
currently has many non-ASCII characters.  Although most of these are
in the modules that deal with international characters, there are many
instances in otherwise-ordinary code, for example, the identifier
color-cie-ε in lisp/color.el, and the message containing the string
"the ‘+’ in this last example" in lisp/org/org-bibtex.el.

Despite the above, one can get lots of useful work done in an ASCII-only
environment when editing the Emacs source code.  This would continue
to be true even if Emacs used directed quotes in the source code more often.

> Reading your mail across an SSH link with my ISP, I see these quote
> marks as an inverted "?".  The same in mutt, where I am currently
> typing, the same when I load it into Emacs.

Yes, that's the default behavior if one is using the C locale.  These
days, though, it's typically nicer to use a locale like en_US.utf8
when developing Emacs code.  This works across an SSH link on a Linux
terminal -- I just now tried it, and the above non-ASCII examples worked
fine.  Although ASCII-only environments still exist, they're becoming
less important for Emacs development.