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

[Oleh Krehel]

Richard Stallman <address@hidden> writes:

>   > > Are the ASCII equivalents of the two curly braces ` and '?
>
>   > No, they are ' and ', in line with the recommendations of the GNU
>   > Coding Standards.
>
> Does this mean that both curly braces, in Emacs Lisp doc strings,
> will appear as ' on a terminal which can't display curly braces?

Not only there, but everywhere for people like me who will use the
display table to modify "‘" to display as "'", because I completely
disagree with the change and think that the new quotes are ugly and hard
to input.

> That's a total screw.  Developers using such a display
> will not be able to distinguish the two.

I think the biggest screw hasn't yet been mentioned. If the change is to
go through, I think the lesser evil would be to completely forbid the
old style of quoting. Which of course won't happen, even if the change
is to go through.

And then we are left with a greater evil: two styles of quotes forever
intertwined. There's no way I'm switching the quoting style in any of my
(3rd party) packages, unless the lesser evil path leads to them being
forbidden.