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

[Dmitry Gutov]

On 06/23/2015 04:34 PM, Stefan Monnier wrote:

> For me the main issue in source code's use of `...' is that
> it's ambiguous.  Using curly quotes is one way to solve this issue (tho
> it should come with some escaping mechanism to make sure that the very
> rare other uses of curly quotes in source code aren't ambiguous).

Indeed. We will need an unambiguous escaping mechanism either way.

> We could also keep using `...' in source code with some escaping
> mechanism (better and more complete than the one we currently have).

Would someone please just pick one? It seems the exact choice of this 
mechanism is irrelevant to the choice of which quotes to use.

The obvious approach is to use backslashes, but then you'll have to use 
four of them to escape a single quote character in a docstring.

> If we render using curly quotes, for aesthetic reasons, then using curly
> quotes in the source code has also the advantage of eliminating magic
> (font-lock or whatnot) between the two.

And then when we switch to a different rendering, we'll be stuck with 
the curlies anyway, for compatibility reasons.

A font-lock solution is nicer because it doesn't require any changes to 
the public Lisp API.