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

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Tassilo Horn writes:

 > Well, there could be
 > 
 > (defun foo-bar ()
 >   "Computes the Foo-Bar sequence.
 > For a description of the Foo-Bar sequence, see
 > ‘Foo-Bar’, John Doe et al., Proceedings on Foo Bar, 2012."
 >   ...)
 > 
 > where ‘Foo-Bar’ is a real quote rather than a symbol markup.  Of
 > courses, such cases are probably rare but still there's a point in
 > having symbol markup separated from quoting.  (Well, ok, then the
 > above quote should simply be changed to “Foo-Bar” and we're good
 > again.)

Use of double quotes in this context is the standard convention for
U.S. academics, so to that extent it's even less common than you
suggest.  Nevertheless, we should permit single quotes.  Then
\-escaping will allow you to specify that the quote is not
syntactically significant, as usual.

I don't really see a difference between "‘" and "`" for this purpose,
which is why I can only give lukewarm support to the proposal.  I
consider double quotes (for trings and the like) a much more important
direction.  But that's a much bigger step, which could easily prove
infeasible.

Paul's patch is a small step toward exploiting the possibilities for
improved syntax via Unicode that doesn't give us much, but if Alan,
Drew, and RMS are right, it isn't going to hurt anybody much while
we're trying it, either.  I expect this experiment to produce both
negative and positive surprises -- that's why we do experiments, after
all -- because the results occasionally surprise us!