Re: [Emacs-diffs] emacs-25 26b56dc: Fix some single quotes in documentation

[Paul Eggert]

On 03/15/2016 05:52 PM, Drew Adams wrote:
> Were identical straight quotes (') used in NEWS before you used them? 
> I don't think so. Except maybe for the occasional typo.

They were used, and they weren't typos. Straight quoting is an 
alternative style of quoting, which is valid in its own right.

> > Although grave quotes are popular Emacs source code they have
> > never been the only style for all text,
> In Emacs they have been.  Counter-examples?  Or did you mean all
> text anywhere, including outside of Emacs?

I meant within the text files in the Emacs git repository. Although 
grave quoting (with ` and ') has historically been more popular than 
straight quoting (with ' and '), both forms are used, and straight 
quotes are not merely something that I just now added. In particular, 
both quoting styles were used in etc/NEWS even before my changes of this 
week. Last week's commit 985dacfa0f0186531fdae13718d720cf7e27425f of 
etc/NEWS contains at least a dozen uses of straight quoting (I got tired 
of counting after reaching a dozen). Admittedly straight quoting was a 
minority style, but these were not typos.

>> for example, the NEWS entry for Emacs 1.4 (in etc/NEWS.1-17), circa
>> 1985, uses straight quotes for its only quoted string, presumably to
>> distinguish the quotes from the grave accents elsewhere in the entry.
> ... Dunno what you mean by "its only quoted string",

I meant the only quoted string in the NEWS entry for Emacs 1.4. There is 
just one such string, which you numbered "5" in your list. (Your list 
included NEWS entries for other Emacs releases.) Again, I concede that 
straight quoting was a minority style in NEWS entries, but it was a 
perfectly respectable style and it was not just "typos".

> You think they are a better choice; OK, we got that.

It's not a matter of my personal preference. It's the GNU coding style, 
which reflects a reasonable consensus on user-visible text.