Re: backquote quote pair notation: What does it mean in Emacs document?

[Jambunathan K]

> Hi all,
>
> When I read Emacs documents, I often see this kind of notation:
>
> `'
>
> For example, `q' in the following sentence:
>
> setq does not evaluate symbol; it sets the symbol that you write. We
> say that this argument is automatically quoted. The `q' in setq stands
> for "quoted." (source:
> http://www.delorie.com/gnu/docs/elisp-manual-21/elisp_146.html)
>
> One more example, `#level' in the following sentence:
>
> Emacs detects such recursion and prints `#level' instead of
> recursively printing an object already being printed. (source:
> http://www.delorie.com/gnu/docs/elisp-manual-21/elisp_267.html)
>
> Anybody knows the philosophy? Thank you for your reply.

It helps with speed-reading.  As you become more experienced with Emacs,
you will find yourself resorting to the info manual.

Once you know that all the configuration variables, commands etc. are in
quotes, you can skip over most of English and take a quick shortcut to
the Point-Of-Interest and work back from there.

ps: Think about why we need paragraphs, why we indent the first line of
paragraph, why we need to indent list items etc.  We take these as
matter of course and adopt the convention handed down to us, without
even thinking about how people of yore tried to bring sense out of a
wall of text.


> Best regards,
> Geoffrey Chen
>
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