Re: [Emacs-diffs] master 9ce1d38: Use curved quotes in core elisp diagnostics

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

Dmitry Gutov wrote:
> if you're ... still
> keeping curlies in Elisp source code, then, from where I'm standing, the new
> format sequence is not exactly justified.

%q does help at the C level.  I suppose we could remove %q's documentation, and 
not export it to Lisp.  But perhaps it'd be better to leave things alone and see 
what people actually use.  Developers who prefer ASCII-only formats and who 
don't mind their code not working in Emacs 24.5-and-earlier can do this:

   (format "Environment variable name %qs contains %qs" var "=")

Developers who prefer more-intuitive formats, or who want their code to work 
reasonably well in Emacs 24.5-and-earlier, can do this:

   (format "Environment variable name ‘%s’ contains ‘=’" var)

Both approaches work on Emacs master now.  As the main objection to curved 
quotes appears to be the hassle of typing them in some environments, if a 
developer doesn't mind that hassle then it should be OK to use them.

>> we would have something like:
>>
>>    (message "Press %<?%> or %<h%> for help, %<q%> to quit")
>
> That looks quite nice to me.

Do you like trigraphs too?!?  (Sorry, couldn't resist.  :-)  Whatever niceness 
it has is clearly trumped by the niceness of using quotation marks to represent 
quotation marks, and by the better compatibility of quotation marks when running 
in older Emacs versions.

> when discussing a Lisp solution, you voted in favor of simple
> translation logic, one that didn't even check for pairings.
> substitute-command-keys could do the same.

I suppose it could, yes.  I'll look into that.