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

[Ulrich Mueller]

>>>>> On Mon, 15 Jun 2015, Alan Mackenzie wrote:

> My view is that the curly quotes should not replace 0x60 and 0x27 in our
> sources, but that the option to display them as curly quotes should be
> made available to those that want it.

> As far as I am aware, there has been no poll to gather and analyse the
> views of Emacs developers on these changes, much less one for Emacs
> users.  This is a Bad Thing.

> What do people think?

U+0060 shouldn't be used as a quote character, for the simple reason
that it isn't one. U+0060 is uniquely defined as the GRAVE ACCENT
character, and as such it doesn't form a pair with U+0027 APOSTROPHE.
(It forms a pair with U+00B4 ACUTE ACCENT: `´ but the latter is
outside of the ASCII range, and of course both are unsuitable as
quotes.)

So please get rid of U+0060 in all places where it is (ab)used as
a quote character rather sooner than later, and use ‘’ (U+2018 U+2019)
instead. And if an ASCII-only alternative is needed, it should be
either '' or "".

The following article (written 15 years ago) summarises the situation
well: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/quotes.html

Ulrich