Re: ASCII-only startup message?

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

John Wiegley wrote:

> in *Help* documentation, it actually
> emphasizes to me that a symbol name is being indicated, rather than a normal
> word that's being single-quoted.

In practice that is not an advantage, since Emacs uses American English with the 
convention that single-quoted words are code, so it is easy to distinguish 
single-quoted symbol names from American-style double-quoted normal words, 
regardless of whether quotes are straight or curved. This is a common convention 
in other GNU programs and in GNU documentation.

>    a. How much work is left until this feature is truly "complete"? One
>       indicator that it's not yet is how many times it's been thought to be so.

Emacs has never been “complete”. That being said, the current implementation 
seems to be at a reasonable sweet spot.

>    b. How much work would it be to revert the whole thing and go back to using
>       `foo' for symbol quoting?

It would take quite a bit of work to do that.

(set text-quoting-style 'grave) in your .emacs will give you much of the 
behavior you want, and I recommend it for users who prefer quoting the 
old-fashioned way. This does not suffice to alter *info* buffers, though, as 
they are generated by Texinfo. In general, this issue is bigger than just Emacs, 
the rest of the GNU world has mostly moved on, and Emacs has been lagging behind.