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

[Dmitry Gutov]

On 08/18/2015 06:55 AM, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:

> Oh, so you want a computer language where characters are used only in
> strings?  Good trick, that.

Ha-ha.

> Seriously, now that we do have Unicode, and good implementations of it
> (although Emacs's isn't complete yet, it's certainly usable), there's
> really no excuse for _a priori_ restricting the character set used in
> a computer language.

In theory.

> Yes, discipline is necessary: the *size* of the
> character set (aside from identifier constituents) should not be
> expanded without good reason.  But which characters are used shouldn't
> be decided on the basis of historically limited charsets.  They should
> be chosen because they are appropriate to their syntactic roles.

Historically limited or not, my keyboard, in English layout, only 
contains a given set of characters. And those are the ones we're 
comfortable typing.

> On the other hand, not liking input methods?  That's not admissible:
> Emacs is the world's biggest, most complex input method, and that is
> its primary mission.  If you can handle Emacs, you can learn a couple
> dozen additional keystroke combinations to input new syntactically
> significant characters (and surely the extended repertoire will
> include only a few such for many years -- "a couple dozen" is a
> generous concession to reactionary fears).

Why would I want to handle them? Having to use input methods adds a 
certain constant overhead, motoric and mental.

That might be fine for a language like APL, where you're forced to use 
an input method almost everywhere. There, you sacrifice the ease of 
input for succinctness across the board. That won't happen for Emacs Lisp.