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

[Dmitry Gutov]

On 06/30/2015 04:50 PM, Stefan Monnier wrote:

> Why can't we use just \ instead of \= ?

We can (and that's what my first proposal did), but it'll require 
changing a certain amount of existing docstrings, and some of them will 
look less nice as a result. Such as substitute-command-keys one, where 
we'll have to escape all those backslashes. Adding a yet-another quoting 
method is not ideal either.

However, if we change \= to \ as the quoting method in 
substitute-command-keys as well, that will be less of a problem. 
Backward compatibility might be, but I've seen no evidence thus far, of 
\= being used anywhere outside of Emacs core.

http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2015-06/msg00646.html