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

[Alan Mackenzie]

Hello, Paul.

On Tue, Jun 23, 2015 at 03:47:51PM -0700, Paul Eggert wrote:
> Alan Mackenzie wrote:
> > You could have had a subject like "Supersede ASCII quoting convention in
> > doc strings"

> That would have been misleading, as the patch did not supersede ASCII
> quoting.  ASCII quoting still works, and is still supported.

It would not have been misleading.  Your aim is precisely to supersede
ASCII quoting.  The very moment curly quoting starts appearing in source
files is when ASCII quoting will stop working properly.

> >> In contrast, you installed commit 
> >> 52c3946c872c8bd96508f74cdda5cbb90c664306, an
> >> equally large change to user behavior, ....

> > Not really.  I simply made the new behaviour optional

> No, your patch changed the default behavior for *Help* buffers.

Paul, that's a really objectionable thing for you to do.  You snipped
the second half of my sentence ", setting the default to "off".", then
proceded to violently agree with what you'd snipped.  Must you?

> The new default negatively affected the UI, in that it made *Help*
> buffers sometimes quote one way, sometimes another, inconsistently.

Rubbish.  The default I set left quote characters untranslated, as has
been the case in Emacs for several decades.  That is utterly consistent.
The point is, that with this new option, users can chose how they want
to see quotes, something which wasn't possible in the days and weeks
before.

[ .... ]

> All this was considerably more than just implementing an option.

No.  It was implementing an option, changing the default, precisely as I
stated.

[ .... ]

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).