Re: how to turn off automatic curly-quoting?

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

Drew Adams wrote:
> Do you know of other occurrences of quoting ordinary text with `...'
> in Emacs?  I doubt it

It's done all the time.  Here are some examples:

"Add `See also ...' to WIDGET if there are any links...."
"... The `ISO year' corresponds approximately to the Gregorian year, but
weeks start on Monday and end on Sunday...."
"If nil, Comint will interpret `carriage control' characters in output...."

Although I tend to agree with you that this is not good style, evidently not 
everyone shares our tastes.  In any event there's no harm translating these to 
curved quotes, as is done in current Emacs master.

> please be specific about what change you have in mind here.

Nothing fancy.  Basically, the ‘message’ function should pass its format 
argument through ‘substitute-command-keys’ before using the format, so that 
quotation marks are displayed according to user preference.