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

[David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>]

Paul Eggert <eggert@cs.ucla.edu> writes:

> David Kastrup wrote:
>> I repeat the documentation help
>> from the `quote' macro:
>
> That was a typo, which I fixed in master commit
> a3c31adea4970b8a7fc7f495e6a6a6d4a93e69ce by escaping the apostrophe.
> Thanks for reporting it.

Not as much a typo as an oversight.  That commit fixes 48 such
oversights and I think that everybody should read the accompanying diff
and ask himself whether he likes the results.

The respective necessary changes are a nuisance to read and a nuisance
to write.

I think this would be a better sell if the DOC strings got some general
markup for code/example that would then be output in an (unmolested)
typewriter font, with the source code inside of that markup again being
unmolested.  It would also be nicer in case people wanted to convert DOC
strings into Texinfo or HTML or other output formats where offsetting
code is a good possibility.

I very much should think that people would be more amenable to offset
code passages in some manner rather than mangle every quote character.

It's also a better sell to teach people to properly offset code passages
in mailing lists/discussion groups "for best results" rather than teach
the quote mangling.

That means coming up with a nice form of entering code, both inline and
as block, and then walk through all the doc strings (naturally, this
concerns even material not containing any quote characters).

It's probably a larger task than what has been done so far.  But I think
that the end result would be much more satisfactory and offer
_independent_ benefits.  And of course it would still allow selective
turning off all quote treatment reasonably easily.

-- 
David Kastrup