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

[Paul Eggert]

Richard Stallman wrote:
> What is the solution that is installed now?

When a grave accent and any matching apostrophe are copied from a docstring to a 
*Help* buffer, they are converted to left and right quotation marks according to 
user preference.  Characters can be escaped with \= to avoid conversion (this is 
a longstanding escape convention in docstrings).

Most existing docstrings don't need to be changed.  For example, in the source 
code the docstring for eval-after-load might contain this:

  "FORM can be an Elisp expression (in which case it's passed to `eval'),
  or a function (in which case it's passed to `funcall' with no arg)."

For this docstring if the user preference is curved quotes the *Help* buffer 
contains this:

  FORM can be an Elisp expression (in which case it's passed to ‘eval’),
  or a function (in which case it's passed to ‘funcall’ with no arg).

If the user preference is traditional, the *Help* buffer looks like this:

  FORM can be an Elisp expression (in which case it's passed to `eval'),
  or a function (in which case it's passed to `funcall' with no arg).


A few doc strings have unusual quoting and use \=X escape sequences to display a 
quoting character X without transformation.  For example, in the source code the 
docstring for texinfo-format-verb might contain this:

  "For example, @verb\{|@|\} results in @ and
  @verb\{+@'e?\\=`!\\=`+} results in @'e?\\=`!\\=`."

For this docstring the *Help* buffer contains the following, regardless of user 
preference for quoting, because the grave accents are escaped:

  For example, @verb{|@|} results in @ and
  @verb{+@'e?`!`+} results in @'e?`!`.