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

[Dmitry Gutov]

On 06/30/2015 08:41 PM, Stefan Monnier wrote:

> > We can (and that's what my first proposal did), but it'll require
> > changing a certain amount of existing docstrings,
>
> Why?  [ Assuming we still accept "\=".  ]

Simply because must \ occur more frequently than \=. Also, depending on 
how "we still accept" is handled, we might have to double the 
backslashes in some of occurrences of \=\= (e.g. if the \ escaping is 
handled in Lisp later).

> AFAICT they're already escaped (with \=), so that would not be worse, or
> am I missing something?

See above. With the my first proposed patch, at least, you'd have to 
change the current

thus, \\=\\=\\=\\= puts \\=\\= into the output,

to something like

thus, \\\\=\\=\\\\=\\= puts \\\\=\\= into the output,

> > Adding a yet-another quoting method is not ideal either.
>
> That's a downside, but \ is "the standard quoting method", so I think
> overall it could be counted as removing an escaping method rather than
> adding one.

If both are retained, even if they're both implemented in 
substitute-command-keys, I think they're bound to interact in 
interesting and unexpected ways.