Re: Translation of single quotes in doc strings is now optional.

[Paul Eggert]

Alan Mackenzie wrote:
> Emacs developers, in particular, will want to be able to see what's there,
> rather than a "prettyfied" version of it.

There have always been multiple ways that a doc string can generate quotes. 
It's true that recent changes have added more ways to do it, but these changes 
haven't introduced a new issue -- it's an issue Emacs already had.

If there is a real need to put raw doc strings in help buffers, we could add 
such a feature -- but any such feature should affect all docstring formatting, 
not just curved quotes, and it certainly shouldn't be the default.  And I don't 
see the need for such a feature anyway.  What's the use case?  Is it an Emacs 
developer who lacks access to the source code but still needs to debug its 
documentation?

> on a terminal where grave and curly quote share a glyph, the
> difference will be invisible.

I don't see that as a serious problem, as people will rarely change this 
setting, and if they do the context will make it clear.  In contrast, the symbol 
names were hard to remember and were not well-chosen for future expansion.  For 
example, the name ‘prefer-unicode’ implied that there would be only one Unicode 
choice, but we might in the future want to support quoting with curved double 
quotes, which would also be Unicode characters.

That being said, if you still prefer ASCII, how about using the Unicode names 
for the characters in question?  That is, ‘APOSTROPHE’, ‘GRAVE ACCENT’, ‘LEFT 
SINGLE QUOTATION MARK’.  That would be easier to remember than ‘prefer-utf8’ and 
the like.

> this whole business of converting to curly
> quotes hasn't yet had the go-ahead from the project maintainer.

You're mistaken.  About a month ago Stefan gave the go-ahead to start using 
curved quotes.