bug#20707: [PROPOSED PATCH] Use curved quoting in C-generated errors

[Alan Mackenzie]

In article <mailman.4052.1433144480.904.bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org> you wrote:
> Quote with curved single quotes, ?like this?, in diagnostics
> generated from C code.  This mostly uses C11-style UTF-8 strings,
> e.g., u8"quote ?like this?", with a backward compatibility macro
> u8 for pre-C11 compilers.

Must we?  It is a very clever thing to be able to do, but just because we
can doesn't mean we must, or even should.

Currently, we can grep C source code (whether on the command line or
within Emacs), specifically specifying quote characters like " (even if
they have to be escaped).  With this patch, this ability will disappear.
OK, there may be some arcane way of specifying these curly quotes, but
somebody like me will have to refer to documentation each time they need
it, since it will be used seldomly enough in comparison to its complexity
that it won't stay memorised.  This is a significant loss.

Curly quotes display as ? on my terminal, sometimes inverted.  This looks
horrible, and is much worse than ", `, and '.  OK, there may be, there
probably is, a way of modifying this terminal to be able to display these
characters, but that's a lot of work, and that work will be multiplied by
the number of people using Emacs on a terminal, not all of whom will be
able to fix it, or have the time to fix it.

And all for what?  So that we can look "more modern" on some display
environments?

At the very least, can you not make curly quoting a configuration option,
something like --with-curly-quotes?

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).