Re: Upcoming loss of usability of Emacs source files and Emacs.

[Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>]

> That being said, Stefan is right that \\` and \\' are shorter than \\=` and
> \\=' and in that sense are nicer.

Shorter is good, but to me the main problem is that I can never remember
this \= escaping (tho maybe after this longish discussion, I'll finally
remember it).  So if even I can't remember it, I can't expect other
people to remember it and even less to use it.

\ escaping OTOH is the standard escaping method.

> First, \` and \' already have a special meaning in docstring sources
> (unrelated to this issue)

I don't know which meaning you're referring to.

> and it will be confusing for people to read
> docstring source code like this:
>
> "LISTIFIED is a list representing each topic header and body:
>
>  \`(depth prefix text)'
>
> or \`(depth prefix text bullet-plus)'"

You lost me here.  Why would someone write the above docstring?
What's the intended meaning?

> Second and more important, here's an example of a docstring that would need
> to be changed:
> "Face for characters displayed as sequences using `^' or `\\'."
> Presumably this would be changed to:
> "Face for characters displayed as sequences using `^' or `\\\\'."
> But this would mean that we need to change the meaning of \\\\ in docstring
> sources too, and that's a bigger deal and would affect more than 20 or so
> docstrings.  For example, we'd need to change this docstring source:

Right, so the issue here is that we need to be able to escape the escape
char, and if we use \\ for that (which is the only choice if we want to
follow the standard escaping mechanism), then we have many places where
we'll have to double the backslashes (and those have already been
doubled for other layers of escaping).


        Stefan