Re: how to turn off automatic curly-quoting?

[Paul Eggert]

On 08/03/2015 12:33 PM, Drew Adams wrote:
> Without context it's hard to know just what is the fix in each case.

They're all doc strings in the Emacs source code.  You can find them 
with 'grep -r'.  The three functions and variables in question are 
custom-add-see-also, calendar-iso-to-absolute, 
comint-inhibit-carriage-motion.  These are just examples of course.

> I don't see `ISO year' in either the Emacs manual or the Elisp manual.

The manual is a different topic.  Its info and PDF files switched to 
curved quotes some time ago (this is in Emacs 24.5).  Its source files 
continue to quote `like this'.  None of the stuff in this email thread 
affects the manual or how it's edited or displayed.

> The use of "..." for anything other than code strings is also a bad 
> idea, IMO.

That's a style issue.  Other GNU projects often use American-style 
straight double-quotes when quoting ordinary English text "like this", 
and use British-style straight apostrophes when quoting code '(like 
this)'; this style is simple and easy to explain and you'll see quite a 
few instances of it in Emacs too.  However, for historical reasons Emacs 
often quotes English text and/or code with grave accent and apostrophe 
`like this'.

If I could wave a magic wand and change the Emacs style to resemble that 
of other GNU projects, without offending existing developers, I'd do 
it.  Unfortunately no magic wands are available and in the meantime we 
need to deal with the quoting that Emacs code actually uses.