Re: Emacs 26.1 release branch created

[Paul Eggert]

Alan Mackenzie wrote:

> Putting a single output
> operation through two `format'-like operations is bizarre and
> extravagant.  It's not something we should encourage.

It's not bizarre; it's routine in Emacs Lisp code. And it's not extravagant: the 
loss in efficiency for messages is tiny, and is not something users have noticed 
or complained about.

> By contrast, binding a controlling variable around an operation is the
> standard Emacs way of doing such things.

It's standard for other things, but it's definitely not standard here. The Emacs 
source code never does it this way.

> How many such instances are there in the code anyway?

There are about 400 instances of '(message "%s"' or '(error "%s"' in the Emacs 
source code. For decades this has been common practice when an Elisp programmer 
wants to avoid translation or formatting in the argument to 'message'-like 
functions. It's not that easy to count how many of the 400 instances are for 
quotes as opposed to being for other things, but I'd guess dozens.

> This would need fleshing out with something like "To inhibit
> or influence this translation of ASCII quotes, see text-quoting-style".

Sure, that's easy. Revised proposal attached.

> The "boilerplate" you want to replace is short and to the point,

It is not short; it's discursive and it gets in the way. In your proposal, it's 
about ten lines of boilerplate for each affected function, boilerplate that is 
about as long as the main function description itself. We should move most of 
this boilerplate to a common section, and briefly allude to it in each affected 
function. This will give us room to expand on the issue in the common section, 
which I've done in my proposal - it has about twenty lines discussing the issue, 
and this is shorter and provides more useful info than repeating ten lines in 
multiple places.

> A further general point about this bit of doc is its rather strange use
> of the verb "generate".

Also easy; the revised proposal (attached) uses "translates to" instead of 
"generates".

0001-Improve-text-quoting-style-doc-in-lispref.patch
Description: Text Data