Re: Translation of single quotes in doc strings is now optional.

[Paul Eggert]

Alan Mackenzie wrote:
> Please regard this as a quick fix to ease problems that we've already
> discussed extensively elsewhere.  Nevertheless, if curly quotes are
> going to become permanent in Emacs, something of the like is going to be
> needed on a permanent basis.

Although this quick fix adds complexity, perhaps it's worth it.  Glenn fixed 
some minor glitches introduced by the quick fix, and I just now patched most of 
the other problems I found with it.  I changed the values to be more mnemonic, 
so that one can now use (setq 'help-quote-translation ?`) to get the traditional 
Emacs quoting style.  The default behavior when the user has not customized the 
new variable is now to generate curved quotes when possible and to fall back on 
straight quotes when in environments that can't handle curved quotes, as this 
should yield better behavior on newer platforms without making things more 
difficult on old-fashioned ones.

I'd like to use the new variable to customize quotes used in diagnostics too. 
So perhaps we should rename it from help-quote-translation to just 
quote-translation.  But this can wait until we think through how diagnostic 
handling should be done.  A simple approach would be to extend 'format' via a ` 
flag, so that we can replace (format "Rename `%s' to `%s'" old new) with (format 
"Rename %`s to %`s" old new) to get customizable quotes, but this would entail 
changing several format calls in the source and I am trying to think of 
something less intrusive.