Re: [Emacs-diffs] master 9ffb6ce 5/5: Quoting fixes in lisp/international and lisp/leim

[David Kastrup]

Alan Mackenzie <address@hidden> writes:

> Hello, Paul.
>
> On Wed, Sep 02, 2015 at 09:32:42AM -0700, Paul Eggert wrote:
>> Alan Mackenzie wrote:
>> > Using my  standard font, lat1-16, the curly quotes use the same glyphs as
>> > ` and ', hence are visibly indistinguishable from them.
>
>> That's no longer true as of yesterday's master commit 
>> 1a3518e7c361a9ceaa017c1334a83d14e0651a4e.
>
> I'm afraid it is still true.  After doing a C-h f c-mode, apparent
> quotes were in the buffer.  Checking them with C-u C-x =, they were
> indeed curly quotes, but were displayed the same as ASCII quotes.

Man, this is like a renaissance of the Emacs 18 backspace/C-h
controversy.  "your terminal should"/"no, it doesn't"/"any sane terminal
described by termcap/terminfo/ADM3A compatibility"/"no, it doesn't".

This change is _not_ going to buy us any new users.  Reliability wins
over aesthetics (which can be ameliorated by font choices if you are
bothered) hands down, every time.

By the way, ' is an _apostrophe_.  Changing it to an open single quote
mark in words like "don't" is utterly wrong, having to write \\=' for
every word with an apostrophe is not a reasonable option.  Telling
apostrophes from right single quote marks is reasonably easy by looking
at the surrounding characters, but "reasonably easy" does not make for
an idiot-proof and idiot-rememberable rule.  So we are buying into some
"do what I mean" territory here, and advanced word processor users will
love to tell you how much they love "autocorrecting" quotes.

I really don't see any sane way around defining some satisfactorily
natural markup sequences for quoting literal material inline and in
blocks.

-- 
David Kastrup