Re: quotation marks [was Re: TUTORIAL.de updated]

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

Paul said:
> For user interfaces it would be better if Emacs quoted “like this” or
> ‘like this’ (i.e., using directed quote marks) in the typical case
> where these quote marks are supported.

I actually much prefer symmetry, the way it was with pre-unicode
X fonts.  E.g. ‛myfoo’.

> One way to address this would be to prefer directed
> quote marks within the Emacs source code; the surrounding
> technology should recognize these quotes and do the right
> thing when displaying diagnostics on ASCII-only platforms.

One other problem (besides display) with directed quote marks is that
they're not as easy/convenient to type.

Eli wrote:
> Before we go that way, we will need to make sure the closing quote
> mark behaves like ' does, wrt syntax (and thus word-level cursor
> movement commands).  Currently it doesn't.

While we'd probably want to fine tune this part, I don't think it's
a serious problem.  After all, the syntax of ' already varies depending
on the major mode, so it's already not always doing the right thing
(and I regularly bump into such problems where C-h f doesn't properly
get the function name from the text around point because of that), and
changing to directed quote marks could actually help with this problem.


        Stefan