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

[Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org>]

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  > > I think you may have misunderstood what the controversy is about.
  > > It's not about adding or not adding support for curly quotes and curly
  > > ellipses in users' documents.  It's about whether or not to replace
  > > ` and ' in Emacs's source files' error messages and comments with
  > > curly quotes,

For overall ease of maintenance, I think we should discourage use of
curly quotes and other non-ASCII characters in comments within Emacs
sources and Emacs packages, because they are a _gratuitous_ impediment
to some developers' editing the sources.  That is, they cause trouble
for some, while providing no _practical_ benefit to anyone.

However, I see two exceptions where non-ASCII characters ought to be used.

* When giving someone's name, that is normally written with accented letters,
  it is reasonable to write the person's name correctly.

  If your terminal can't display those characters, you'll still see
  the name more or less, and it won't interfere with your
  understanding of the code (since the name doesn't explain the code).

* When talking about the use of specific non-ASCII characters, it is reasonable
  to write those characters literally.

  In this case, mentioning those characters is not gratuitous.

Does anyone suggest other exceptions?

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman
President, Free Software Foundation (gnu.org, fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (internethalloffame.org)
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