bug#30217: Ambiguity in NEWS in emacs-26.0.91

[Noam Postavsky]

Drew Adams <drew.adams@oracle.com> writes:

>> To give a less confusing error in cases like Bug#2967 and Bug#23425.
>
> Seriously?  This is an absolutely horrible "fix" for each
> of those problems.  This "cure" is worse than either of
> those diseases, and as we all know, I think such diseases
> are pretty awful.
>
> The error message seems to be _super_ confusing.  It gives
> no indication of problems such as those bugs, and it does
> not begin to enlighten anyone about the confusion at their
> heart.

The OP of Bug#2967 says

    I think it would be good if emacs looked for smart quotes in .emacs
    files and gave a warning or notice if it detected them. This would
    help troubleshooting.

Which is exactly what's being done now.  The OP of Bug#23425 says

    When this output is fed back into Emacs with M-:, it produces an obscure
    error message.

The Emacs 25 error for the expression in question is

    (wrong-number-of-arguments setq 31)

In Emacs 26.0.91, it is

    (invalid-read-syntax "strange quote" "’")

I think this is an improvement, since it does, in fact, indicate there
is a problematic use of ’.

Why do you think the signalling an error in this case is a bad idea?

> If no one has a real fix for such bugs yet then please just
> leave them open until someone comes up with a good idea.
> This "fix" is not a good idea - for those bugs at least.
>
> If this fix has some other purpose, then let's please
> know what that is and talk about it.
>
> But if such problems are the only reason for this "fix"
> then please consider getting rid of such silly and useless
> escaping and just change the error message

I don't quite understand what you mean by "getting rid of... escaping"
but keeping the error message.  It sounds like a you are contradicting
yourself.

> to make clear just what confusion it is meant to address: say that the
> character is not an ascii apostrophe or whatever, if that confusion is
> the real problem this is trying to solve.

Changing the error message is always possible, of course.  I'm not sure
if bringing "ascii" into it would make things clearer though.  Concrete
suggestions welcome.

> And besides - where do you stop doing this kind of thing?
>
> Do we do something similar for characters that can
> be mistaken for a period, in case you use one in an
> attempt at dotted-pair syntax?
>
> Do we do something similar for chars that can be
> mistaken for a comma, inside backquoted sexps?
>
> Do we do something similar for chars that can be
> mistaken for a backquote?  An at-sign?  Ordinary
> parentheses?

Maybe everything in the "Unicode confusables" listing?  Practically
speaking, I've never heard of problems with other characters, except
perhaps in programming "puzzles", obfuscated code contents and the like.

> I really hope you reconsider this.  To me it looks
> like an ugly hack that can bring only harm (including
> more, not less, confusion), not good.

Do you have any specific harms/confusion in mind?