RE: ASCII-only startup message?

[Drew Adams]

> > Emacs should (continue to) use U+0027 (ASCII apostrophe) as apostrophe
> > (in its own doc, *scratch* comments, and so on).
> 
> The Emacs source code largely does that already, so I assume you’re
> talking about how the documentation is presented to the user. 

The question raised was use in *scratch*.  But yes, I am talking about
source-code comments that users can see.

(And yes, _personally_, I would prefer that we make life easier for
users in Info and *Help* and *Messages* and ... too, if that were
still possible.  But that's not what this discussion is about.)

> It would be a nontrivial project to change Emacs in the way you
> suggest, as many of the punctuation apostrophes are in *info* buffers
> and are generated by Texinfo...

No, I'm not suggesting that now - Texinfo is clearly a lost cause. ;-)
The question was raised about *scratch* and comments in code.

> Traditionally there is no textual distinction between punctuation
> apostrophes and right single quotation marks, 

By "textual distinction" are you saying only that they traditionally
look the same?  If so, I agree.

> ... even though in both cases there are large semantic differences.

Again, I agree.  An apostrophe is not a quotation mark, even if
they look the same or similar.