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Re: Escaping quotes in docstrings, Was: A simple solution to "Upcoming l


From: Paul Eggert
Subject: Re: Escaping quotes in docstrings, Was: A simple solution to "Upcoming loss of usability ..."
Date: Sat, 01 Aug 2015 23:56:44 -0700
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:31.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/31.8.0

Dmitry Gutov wrote:
Here's a contrived example which can't be fixed without that:

(defun ’‘ (a b c)
   "It's called `’‘'."
   (+ 1 2 3))

Yes, and one can come up with other contrived examples that fail even without putting curved quotes into the name. Elisp function names can contain any character: apostrophe, grave accent, newline, parenthesis, space, etc., and I'm sure many of these other special characters also cause problems in help buffers.

While it might be worthwhile to fix this, it's an independent issue. If it is fixed, I expect you're right that substitute-command-keys will need to be teased apart; this is not just because of curved quotes, but also because its other substitutions can generate characters that also need special treatment. If someone wants to take on that task, that's great, so long as it doesn't get in the way of ordinary use of *Help* buffers. In particular, users should be able to type ‘C-h f length RET’, see this in a *Help* buffer:

  To get the number of bytes, use ‘string-bytes’.

and if they save and later yank this text into a source-code buffer they should get what they see, not a bowdlerized version with ASCII approximations.



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