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

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

Dmitry Gutov wrote:
> On 08/22/2015 09:48 PM, Paul Eggert wrote:
>> Dmitry Gutov wrote:
>>
>>> Regarding automatic translation in `format': do you anticipate someone,
>>> somewhere, having a file with "‘add-to-list’" in its name
>>
>> Emacs diagnostics that use quotes have never worked well when they quote
>> a file name or any other string that contains quotes or newlines.
>
> I'm not talking about diagnostics, just about the function `format', which is
> used in different contexts.

Sorry, I'm not understanding the distinction.  The standard diagnostics 
functions ‘message’, ‘error’, etc. all call ‘format’.  Any of these functions 
can run into trouble when quoting a file name that can contain arbitrary characters.

For example:

   (format "Moving file ‘%s’ to ‘%s’" src dest)
   (message "Moving file ‘%s’ to ‘%s’" src dest)
   (error "Cannot move file ‘%s’ to ‘%s’" src dest)

All three uses generate ambiguous output if SRC and DEST can contain arbitrary 
characters, and this is true even if we fiddle with the format strings’ quoting 
styles.