Re: Q: text-quoting-style -- is its value a string or a symbol?

[T.V Raman]

John I meant the *Help* buffer text.

I guess I got confused because with the new quoting strategy I had a
hard time distinguishing the symbol vs string quoting styles ---
partly because of the way I've defined the mapping from various quote
characters to text-to-speech.
That the prose itself has the word "quote" appearing in it makes the
entire thing a completely confusing experience when you hear it
spoken:-) -- though some of that is understandably unavoidable.

But the fact remains, the distinction is subtle -- and if it's not
obvious to someone who has used Emacs for 20 years, then it's not
going to be obvious to at least some number of users. From that
perspective, I find the response "that  is how it is everywhere -- get
used to it -- or alternatively first go change it everywhere else" somewhat 
unproductive.


I'll attach the *help* buffer text as it shows in my running Emacs-25
session so we are all talking of the same thing.

And now that I've set it to the symbol 'grave, notice how it shows in
the *help* buffer -- at least as I hear it, it's got no quotes around
it whatsoever. So there is asymmetry here with respect to how one sees
a symbol value displayed in the help buffer vs how a symbol value is
documented in the help-buffer text.

If you read it by itself, you'll still not know how to distinguish
symbols from strings in  the *HElp* buffer unless you bring up Help
for two separate variables, one that takes a string value  and the
other a symbol-value -- and then display the *help* buffer for each
side-by-side. 

Help-Buffer text follows:

text-quoting-style is a variable defined in `C source code'.
Its value is grave

Documentation:
Style to use for single quotes when generating text.
`curve' means quote with curved single quotes ‘like this’.
`straight' means quote with straight apostrophes 'like this'.
`grave' means quote with grave accent and apostrophe `like this'.
The default value nil acts like `curve' if curved single quotes are
displayable, and like `grave' otherwise.

[back]

John Wiegley writes:
 > >>>>> Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> writes:
 > 
 > > It doesn't. It tells me it's a symbol. Why? because of the way it is 
 > > quoted:
 > > with single quotes, not double quotes. Single quotes is how we mark symbols
 > > in doc strings.
 > 
 > Raman, When you say "reading the online documentation" in your original
 > report, do you mean the *Help* text, or the HTML generated for the manual? I
 > want to be sure we're all talking about the same thing.
 > 
 > If you see `foo' written (for example, in *Help*), it is always a symbol
 > (using either those characters, or fancy Unicode single quotes). As Eli says,
 > double-quotes are used to denote strings.
 > 
 > John

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