Re: master ff4de1b: Fix quoting style in Lisp comments

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: Lars Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org>
> Cc: Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>,  Stefan Monnier
>  <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>,  stefan@marxist.se,  juri@linkov.net,
>   rudalics@gmx.at,  emacs-devel@gnu.org
> Date: Thu, 16 Sep 2021 14:32:30 +0200
> 
> Dmitry Gutov <dgutov@yandex.ru> writes:
> 
> >> And please remember that we are not talking only about comments, nor
> >> only about ELisp files.  We are talking about all kinds of plain-text
> >> documentation: comments, Git commit log messages, NEWS, PROBLEMS, text
> >> files in admin/notes/, etc.
> >
> > No, we are not.
> 
> I agree with using '...' in plain text files, like NEWS and PROBLEMS.

If this discussion indicates something it's that "plain text" is open
to interpretation, so if we will have a mandatory convention, we'd
need to come up with an explicit list.  E.g., NEWS and PROBLEMS are by
default in Outline mode, not in Text mode, so someone could claim they
aren't "plain text".

> .el/.c files are not plain text files, they are source code files, and I
> do not agree that we have to (or should) change the convention from
> `...'  there.  At least not until we have fixed our tool chain to
> respect '...'  in .el/.c files -- and if we decide to move to '...', we
> should do so everywhere in those files: Both doc strings and comments.

Well, we already have hundreds of quotes 'like this' in both Lisp and
C files, so if highlighting that is a problem, let's work on that,
because reverting all those hundreds of quotes sounds like a lot of
code churn.  (Btw, C and Lisp are not the only programming languages
we use in Emacs sources, is the above valid for all the source files?)

> I don't think the ` character is "ugly" -- that Markdown (for
> instance) uses it for similar purposes (but as `...`) shows that
> it's a character that people are comfortable with using in
> semi-structured non-plain-text files like source code files.

We've had this argument, and I'd prefer not to have it again.
(Markdown is not really relevant because `...` does not display with
these characters.)

> (And when it comes to commit messages, I don't think we should have a
> convention -- it just doesn't matter, and people should use whatever
> they want to.)

We produce ChangeLog files from that.

And if we allow people to do what they want, then we have that
already, so I see no reason to argue about conventions no one will
follow.