Re: quotation marks [was Re: TUTORIAL.de updated]

[Alan Mackenzie]

Hi, Paul.

On Fri, Jan 20, 2012 at 02:17:32PM -0800, Paul Eggert wrote:
> On 01/20/2012 01:24 AM, Eli Zaretskii wrote:

> Those messages are about using ASCII-only email, or having Emacs not
> unexpectedly insert Unicode characters into an ASCII-only document,
> or things of that sort, things that are about Emacs users in general.
> Those are all valid issues, but they don't contradict the basic point
> that it's becoming less important to cater to ASCII-only development
> environments.

Sorry, but that's a philosophical point that cannot pass without
challenge.  Because fewer people are using tty environments (which is
basically what is meant here by "ASCII-only") is it really "less
important" to support them?  Or is there some other reason?

There are at least three Emacs developers who use a tty rather than a
GUI.  There are users who do the same.  (Why use a GUI for pure text
work, indeed?)  To adapt a tty for random Unicode characters is a
non-trivial amount of work.

> We routinely place more requirements on Emacs developers than on Emacs users,
> and in particular we assume that Emacs developers can routinely view and
> otherwise deal with non-ASCII characters when they need to.  This is not
> an assumption we could have made 30 years ago, but it's a safe assumption
> today.

When I need to view one (which is rare), I use C-u C-x =.

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).