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

[Andy Moreton]

On Wed 01 Jul 2015, Paul Eggert wrote:

> Andy Moreton wrote:
>> is there a good reason why the
>> documentation is a string containing escapes rather than a sexp using
>> the normal quoting mechanisms ?
>
> One good reason is inertia. :-)  There's a lot of code dealing with
> docstrings; e.g., they can be in C code as well as in Lisp, and are processed
> specially by source transformation.  That being said, how would the sexps
> work, and why would they be an improvement?  Can you give an example?

This was nothing more than idle musing. Doc strings contain markup for
quoted or interpolated expressions, which seem to match what quote and
backquote do in ordinary elisp.

    AndyM