Re: Colons in indices

[karl]

    What do you do with a node whose name is foo@:bar?  Produce foo@@:bar?

I suppose we could, although I don't think it's ever going to be
possible to officially support @ in node names (beyond what you already
did, Eli).

    One problem with these quotations is that you can no longer find
    these cross references and menu items by searching for the literal
    node name.

I agree it's a problem, but what's the alternative?

    This is actually copied from a termcap manual, albeit an old one.  I
    don't know if it's okay to break such manuals.

Clearly we should try hard to avoid breaking old manuals.  Given the
choice between breaking old manuals and quoting colons, I think we
should quote the colons.

Even quoting colons is going to meet with a lot of resistance and is
going to require changes in everything that produces or reads info.

We should consider the other "forbidden" characters in node names at the
same time. ' for example (I think that one is easy because it's only
texinfo.tex that cares).  And comma (harder, maybe impossible, requires
changing how @node and Node: lines are parsed).  {}.  I forget the
others offhand.

K