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

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Richard Stallman writes:

 > Your arguments are heated but not coherent.

You might try to refute them, rather than descending to mere name-
calling.  Especially in a post where you immediately accuse someone
else of name-calling:

 > Denigrating a significant class of users with the term "lobby" does
 > not make them less important or less worthy of respect.

No, the term "lobby" does not make anybody worthy of less respect.  A
lobby is simply a group of people with a common interest, who advocate
that interest to decision-makers.  Given that lobbying is one of your
most important activities, I don't see why you would associate it with
"denigration".

And I've already granted that the costs to those who *can* live with
just ASCII, and *don't* need input methods yet, matter.  I think
they're low enough to be worth paying, just as you think the sacrifice
of Japanese OCR is a cost that *I* should pay.  Such conflicts can't
be waved away, and each side will lobby for its own interest.

 > The situation is simple: using curly quotes in doc strings would be
 > a substantial inconvenience for many users _for no practical
 > benefit_.

And now you reveal *your* prejudice.  That's no help.  Paul claims
practical benefit; I agree -- and even Stefan seems to see at least a
possibility of practical benefit.

But both sides are just speculating about what most users will feel.
For reasons I've explained elsewhere, I believe only an experiment can
help determine more accurately what the mass of users will think.