Re: [Emacs-diffs] master 9ce1d38: Use curved quotes in core elisp diagnostics

[Paul Eggert]

Dmitry Gutov wrote:
> You could use something like uLSQM", employed in the C code.

You mean, instead of this:

   (message "Buffer ‘%s’ is read only." buf)

we do this:

   (message (concat "Buffer "uLSQM"%s"uRSQM" is read only.") buf)

where uLSQM and uRSQM are global string constants?  I did consider that, but 
rejected it as it would make Lisp code too hard to read and maintain.  uLSQM and 
uRSQM are needed in C code due to C99's limitations, but at least there it is 
reasonably rare (fewer than a hundred uses) and C is already pretty ugly so we 
can put up with it.  If we did the above sort of thing to Lisp we'd need to 
uglify thousands of uses, which would not be a good thing.

By the way I considered many other possibilities, and you're welcome to bring up 
other alternatives you're interested in.  Maybe we can come up with something 
better.  The point of this change is to fix a real problem, after all, not to 
stir up trouble.

> Enabling electric-quote-mode means *all* quotes will be translated to curvy 
> ones in the source code one types from there on, automatically.

No, just the grave accents in strings and comments, and any matching 
apostrophes; this is a considerably lighter touch than what the above remark 
implies.  Occasionally one needs to type C-q ` when one really needs a grave 
accent inside a string, but that's pretty rare unless one is hard-coding 
grave-accent quoting which is something we should be moving away from nowadays 
anyway.