Re: Change of Lisp syntax for "fancy" quotes in Emacs 27?

[Alan Third]

On Sat, Feb 03, 2018 at 08:25:01PM -0500, Clément Pit-Claudel wrote:
> On 2018-02-03 20:16, Michael Heerdegen wrote:
> > Helpfulness of error messages surely depends on the beholder, and on
> > expectations.  In my eyes,
> > 
> >> Symbol's value as variable is void: 'аbbrevs-changed
> > is quite clear: you think this        ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ is a quoted
> > thing, but the error message calls it a symbol.  So there must be a
> > problem with that quote, it has obviously gotten read as part of the
> > symbol.  Sure, you have still to find out why.
> 
> I think you're making Eli's point, actually :)
> 
> The problem isn't the quote: it's the CYRILLIC SMALL LETTER A
> instead of LATIN SMALL LETTER A. IOW, (string= "аbbrevs-changed"
> "abbrevs-changed") is nil.
> 
> I think Eli was illustrating the confusion that can stem from
> Unicode confusables (and I must agree that the error message could
> be much better ^^)

Something like:

Symbol's value as variable is void: 'аbbrevs-changed
Did you mean `abbrevs-changed'?
Symbol contains `а' (CYRILLIC SMALL LETTER A) at character 0, did you
mean `a' (LATIN SMALL LETTER A)?

The middle line would require Emacs to do a fuzzy search for similar
symbols, which may be too much. Something like that could be helpful
even in cases where the name has been mistyped (abbrev-changed instead
of abbrevs-changed, for example).

-- 
Alan Third