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

[Dmitry Gutov]

On 06/18/2015 07:29 AM, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:

> You're missing the point by calling them "rare".  They are *not* rare;
> they are in daily use by the 99.44% of the English-speaking population
> that *doesn't* program.

Quotes are not that rare, but using a more rare characters would be even 
better, right? At least, by that logic.

> The point is that these characters have better semantics from the
> point of view of *new* programmers and even non-programmers.

Native-English speaking programmers who are into typography, maybe?

> APL.

Yep, not a markup language.

>   > Markdown, for instance, when rendered, only emphasizes code
>   > segments using a special tag, which translates into a different
>   > font face/color/etc. I don't see why we won't choose to do that, or
>   > allow users to customize that aspect.
>
> That would be insane.  Markdown (and ReST) do that because they, too,
> need to deal with the ASCII-capped lobby, or at least they still did
> when they were first developed a decade or so ago.

What's insane about only highlighting code segments with color?

> But *humans* don't
> need tags, and programs are rapidly acquiring the ability to do
> without.  I believe we should look forward to the day when that is the
> norm, and *get there first*.

I don't understand this response. I only mentioned tags because Markdown 
renders to HTML.