Re: Colon in index items

[Richard Stallman]

    There has been a proposal to (automatically) use <colon> instead of :.
    This cure seems worse than the disease to me.

It is not perfect, but it seems much better than what we are doing
now, which is changing the @cindex command args to say "colon".  It is
very easy and the output will work with old versions of Info readers.

Since this is not perfect, it might be desirable in addition to modify
Info readers to support a kind of quoting in the menu item name.
Then, perhaps 2 years later, you could change Makeinfo to output that
quoting construct when necessary.  This way we would end up at
basically the same place, but the users would not see an incompatible
change.

    The best idea we (mainly Eli :) had was to use null characters, so that
    node names/index entries in info files would be, say, 
address@hidden@address@hidden@ (only
    if the name contains a : or other problematic character only).  At least
    such characters may be invisible when displayed, sometimes.

^@ is not invisible in Emacs, unless we go to some effort to hide it,
in which case we could just as easily hide something else.