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

[Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org>]

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     > * English phrases, e.g., `close in spirit', `things'.

English quotations should use doublequotes.
We use singlequotes only to present strings of example text
to be processed in a program somehow.  In the case of Emacs,
they are for text that gets manipulated inside Emacs.

     > * Key sequences, e.g., `C-x ESC O P'.

Key sequences (which only go through the keyboard) shouldn't be
quoted with singlequotes, or any kind of quotes.

   * Lisp patterns, e.g., `(ATOM . ELLIPSIS)'.

   * Lisp code, e.g., `(thai nil nil (mark))'.

These two cases (which are really the same case, since you can put a
metasyntactic variable into anything) are not supposed to be quoted
with singlequotes.

The following cases do get quoted with singlequotes:

   * Symbols, e.g., `load-file'

   * Info nodes, e.g., `(emacs)Lisp Libraries'.

   * URLs, e.g., `http://bama.ua.edu/cgi-bin/man-cgi?lp'

   * Characters, e.g., `&', ` '.

   * Strings, e.g., `69'.

   * Regular expressions, e.g., `\\(_P\\|_PROTO\\)'.

   * Non-Lisp code, e.g., `ls -lR'.

It could conceivably be useful to use multiple kinds of quotation to
distinguish among these cases.  But we can't have enough kinds of
quotation marks to give each of these its own kind.  One would
need to use quoting style A for some of then, style B for some others,
style C for some others, etc.

It would take careful thought to figure out how to distribute (say)
three styles of showing quotes among those different uses.

I am not sure it is worth doing anything about.

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman
President, Free Software Foundation (gnu.org, fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (internethalloffame.org)
Skype: No way! See stallman.org/skype.html.