bug#20707: [PROPOSED PATCH] Use curved quoting in C-generated errors

[Alan Mackenzie]

Hello, Paul.

On Tue, Jun 02, 2015 at 08:39:34AM -0700, Paul Eggert wrote:
> Alan Mackenzie wrote:

> > What I really meant with my question is how do you type curly characters
> > when outwith Emacs?  Say, inside of less, or at a bash shell prompt, or
> > in any of numerous other tools one might wish to use?

> It doesn't come up that often, but for 'less' I am typically searching and 
> searching for '.' will do -- I sometimes do that even for ASCII-only 
> searches, 
> as '.' is easier to type than, say, '\'.  I typically run Bash under Emacs 
> where 
> it's not a problem there either.

> In the rarer cases where I'm outside Emacs or want to search just for curved 
> quotes and nothing else, I can type Compose < ' and Compose > ' to get curved 
> single quotes.  On my current keyboard, the Compose key looks like a menu and 
> is 
> just to the right of the right Alt key; this is the default setup that came 
> with 
> Ubuntu 15.04.  I'm sure one can get the Compose key to work on the Linux 
> console 
> too, as plenty of people need to type accented letters on the Linux console.

There appears to be provision for a compose key in the Linux terminal,
yes; it's partially documented in man loadkeys.

> > it's yet another trivial annoyance that one has to heep onto all

> Heh.  Trivial annoyances are what motivated this change.  I've been trivially 
> annoyed at Emacs quoting `like this' for at least a decade.  Nearly every 
> other 
> GNU package has fixed it.  I was hoping Somebody Else would fix it for Emacs, 
> but nobody ever stepped up so here we are.

You're breaking things.  Right now, Emacs works in "any" environment, and
I think this was a positive design decision way back when.  You're now
changing Emacs so that its proper working is restricted to UTF-8
environemnts, which is fine for you because you run under such.

As I've suggested before, why don't you make --with-curly-quotes a
configuration option?

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).