RE: backquote quote pair notation: What does it mean in Emacsdocument?

[Drew Adams]

> > Anybody knows the philosophy? Thank you for your reply.
> 
> It helps with speed-reading.  As you become more experienced
> with Emacs, you will find yourself resorting to the info manual.

Think of it as a simple quotation mechanism or rudimentary highlighting that
works with even the simplest plain-text editor or mode.  It makes the quoted
text stand out - nothing more.

It is also relatively easy for code to parse, to treat the quoted passages in
various ways - in particular, highlighting them (color etc.).

Compare the two attached screenshots, for instance.  See how the quoted text
stands out more when it is highlighted, and how that can help readability.

Look at how key sequences are handled in different ways here: as strings
("<f5>", "C-c y"), single-quoted: `C-c n', and using vector syntax: ([?\C-=],
[f7]).  Each of these notations/syntaxes has a different meaning for Emacs and
Emacs Lisp.

> Once you know that all the configuration variables, commands etc.
> are in quotes, you can skip over most of English and take a quick
> shortcut to the Point-Of-Interest and work back from there.
> 
> ps: Think about why we need paragraphs, why we indent the 
> first line of paragraph, why we need to indent list items etc.
> We take these as matter of course and adopt the convention handed
> down to us, without even thinking about how people of yore tried
> to bring sense out of a wall of text.

throw-highlighted-quoted.png
Description: PNG image

throw-unhighlighted-quoted.png
Description: PNG image