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

[Paul Eggert]

Stefan Monnier wrote:
> > \` and \' already have a special meaning in docstring sources
> > >(unrelated to this issue)
> I don't know which meaning you're referring to.

After looking into this I decided that \` and \' are typically mistakes.

I had thought that they may have sometimes have been inserted to avoid 
highlighting when viewing the sources.  For example, a source docstring like 
"...\`foo\'..." acts like "...`foo'..." except that when one is viewing the 
source the "foo" is not highlighted (and of course one sees the 
otherwise-unnecessary backslashes).  However, highlighting occurs anyway when 
the docstring is copied into a *Help* buffer, which means that in some sense 
it's misleading to try to suppress the source highlighting.

There appears to be no rhyme or reason to the few instances of backslash-quotes 
in strings, some of which are obviously just typos, so I took the liberty of 
eliding them in master commit 3213d7707026573ca425ba1c865b7fa1a8b46639.