Re: Upcoming loss of usability of Emacs source files and Emacs.

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

Alan Mackenzie wrote:

> Any benefits there may be are not _practical_ ones.

Sure they are.  They make documentation strings easier to read, for people who 
are used to today's typical displays.  And there are other practical benefits, 
e.g., being able to cut and paste from help buffers that use modern styles.

> In a true experiment, comment and objections would be
> actively encouraged at an early stage.  I don't think this has happened
> wrt these curly quote changes.

You're quite mistaken.  The doc string fixes were proposed on 20 April in 
Bug#20385.  Comments were solicited and the fixes were improved over a period of 
several weeks, before the patch was installed on May 28.

In contrast, you installed commit 52c3946c872c8bd96508f74cdda5cbb90c664306, an 
equally large change to user behavior, and without first proposing it so that we 
could comment on it (surely you knew it would be controversial) and catch the 
obvious errors with it (even assuming we agreed with the idea).  This was 
another mistake, one that still needs some work.

I have obligations in the next few hours that prevent me from thinking about 
your long recent message on the topic, but I'll return to it as soon as I can.