Re: [Emacs-diffs] master 9ce1d38: Use curved quotes in core elisp diagnostics

[Dmitry Gutov]

On 08/18/2015 08:34 PM, Paul Eggert wrote:

> Most novices don't bother to write bug reports -- they don't even know
> how to write bug reports.

Bug reports are written by users who are at least a little experienced, 
sure, but we shouldn't assume that every such user has necessarily 
become accustomed to Emacs's quirks, and wouldn't call out this problem, 
if it were a real problem.

> But yes, people occasionally gripe about the
> use of grave accent to quote, and this can hurt Emacs's reputation among
> people who may not know it better.  For example,
> <http://wordyenglish.com/musing/typography.html> (2007) says:

I sincerely hope the whole effort wasn't kicked off by this Xah Lee's 
rant. It's pretty shallow. And the author should really "know Emacs 
better" by now.

> "the problem with the GNU is that even today, in 2007, where curly
> quotes have been widely available in word processors for over a decade
> (and Unicode have been practical and widely available for at least 5
> years...), they are still using plain ASCII hacks. (in general, GNU and
> the Open Source morons have like a 5 to 10 years lag in adopting
> technology, for reasons that are inadvertently intentional and or simply
> incapable)"

"morons"... yeah.

> And here we are in 2015, with the quote problem still only partly fixed.

One would have to define the "problem" first.

In 2015, the documentation markup languages (Markdown, Asciidoc, etc) 
support rich content (images, hyperlinks, document structure), and 
decoupling markup from presentation (usually through rendering into HTML).

Yet here we are, not talking about any big features, and instead 
discussing using unicode quotes in the markup (which none of the modern 
markup languages do), because it's "easier" if the markup and 
presentation are the same. That's a step back, if anything.