Re: character syntax fixes needed

[Dave Love]

Stefan Monnier <address@hidden> writes:

>>> I've never seen guillemets used alone.  They always come in pairs in my
>>> experience,
>> But your experience isn't universal.
>
> I never claimed it is.  But unless using string-syntax for those things
> breaks more cases (or in more serious ways) than not using string-syntax, it
> makes sense to choose the lesser of two evils.

It isn't an evil to give quotation marks punctuation syntax.  There's
no need to do anything wrong.  If you want to treat something like
phrases syntactically, I have code to do that which could be extended
to non-ASCII quotation marks.

Making arbitrary special cases _is_ an evil in multilingualization.

>> It's obviously not wide enough to override what Unicode and other
>> authorities document.
>
> Their purpose is different.  Emacs is largely about making the common-case
> convenient (as far as it doesn't make the rare case impossible).

Unicode tells you about essentially all the relevant cases, so that
you know about rare (at least to you) cases.  I don't think I deserve
being patronized over this as I obviously know more about it than most
people and I've done a lot of work to make Emacs just DTRT.

>> Yes, offhand I can think of four uses of " that aren't as balanced
>> quotes, and again Unicode says it has punctuation syntax.
>
> Feel free to share those cases with us, so we can assess them,

The two that correspond directly with guillemets are as ditto signs
and for opening paragraphs continuing a quote.  But I'm not suggesting
changing the standard syntax of `"' -- it's already set to punctuation
for natural language and appropriately for the various programming
languages which typically assume the standard syntax table.

The manual passage concerning _not_ having string syntax is in
`(elisp)Syntax Class Table' under `string quote'.  However, it should
say `natural language' rather than `English'.  (I thought the
occurrences of `English' like that had been fixed at some stage.)