Re: [Emacs-diffs] master 9ffb6ce 5/5: Quoting fixes in lisp/international and lisp/leim

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

Stefan Monnier wrote:
>>> +	   (insert "Don’t output anything.\n"))
>> >I thought you were going to consider translating unpaired quotes, too?
> I'm not sure I'm following.  Can someone explain to me what's the issue
> at play here?

Currently, all apostrophes and right single quotation marks are translated in 
docstrings and diagnostics, even isolated ones such as the example above. 
Dmitry was wondering whether this is the case: it's something he suggested 
earlier and I implemented it that way, but I guess he wasn't sure whether I'd 
done it.

> I'm a bit worried about having too much
> magic going on, so in general automatic conversion should be avoided
> unless it's *really*  often useful and *really*  rarely problematic.

One alternative is to go with a system that normally has no translation, where 
Emacs source-code docstrings and diagnostics use curved quotes that merely stand 
for themselves, and where all curved quotes are displayed/searched-for/yanked as 
ASCII approximations for users who prefer the traditional style.  This would 
remove the need for format-message and/or substitute-command-keys doing any 
quote translation.  A downside is that source code docstrings and diagnostics 
would need to be converted to use curved quotes.