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

[Paul Eggert]

Richard Stallman wrote:
> I think we can, if we decide not to use them in doc strings around lists.
> That way, `( will always be a backquote.
> ` will never occur before a symbol character
> except when it is part of `...'.

Unfortunately that's not true for the current Emacs docstrings.  For example, 
the docstring for verilog-auto-declare-nettype contains this:

Note using `default_nettype none isn't recommended practice;

Here the grave accent is part of Verilog syntax, and should not be displayed as 
a curved quote.  Of course this sort of thing is unusual, but the point is that 
exceptional cases like this do occur and we need an escape syntax to handle them.