Re: Upcoming loss of usability of Emacs source files and Emacs.

[Richard Stallman]

[[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
[[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
[[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]

Your arguments are heated but not coherent.  Denigrating a significant
class of users with the term "lobby" does not make them less important
or less worthy of respect.  You can't refute a practical argument
by targeting an imaginary prejudice.

It is not pertinent what fraction of all computer users use non-ASCII
characters daily.  That doesn't tell us what fraction of Emacs users
use non-ASCII characters -- but that is not pertinent either.  You
implicitly presume that they are in favor of this change, but that is
not true.  Some Emacs users that use non-ASCII characters daily _in
Emacs_ will be inconvenienced by this change.

The situation is simple: using curly quotes in doc strings would be a
substantial inconvenience for many users _for no practical benefit_.

If it provided a practical benefit for other users, we would need to
consider how many gain how much (and what roles they have in Emacs
development), versus how many lose how much.  But since it doesn't,
that question does not arise.

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman
President, Free Software Foundation (gnu.org, fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (internethalloffame.org)
Skype: No way! See stallman.org/skype.html.