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bug#20707: [PROPOSED PATCH] Use curved quoting in C-generated errors
From: |
Alan Mackenzie |
Subject: |
bug#20707: [PROPOSED PATCH] Use curved quoting in C-generated errors |
Date: |
Fri, 12 Jun 2015 11:25:39 +0000 |
User-agent: |
Mutt/1.5.23 (2014-03-12) |
Hello, Paul.
On Thu, Jun 11, 2015 at 07:41:54PM -0700, Paul Eggert wrote:
> Alan Mackenzie wrote:
> > My setup couldn't display curly single quotes
> Sure it could. It displayed curved single quotes as curved single quotes.
> Your
> objection was that your setup also displayed grave accent and apostrophe as
> curved single quotes (a style you happen to prefer), ....
No. The curly quotes had hijacked the glyphs for 0x27 and 0x60. I think
it likely that these glyphs originated as those for 0x27 and 0x60, and
were so before Unicode even existed.
> ... and you wanted your setup to display *different-shaped curves* for
> curved single quotes. This will not be not a problem to the few
> ordinary Emacs users who happen to use a similar obsolescent
> environment; they'll merely see nicely curved single quotes and move
> on.
That's pure speculation. So far, we've got one data point, me, and I was
not at all happy about this aliasing when I discovered it. Nobody has
yet chimed in and said they'd be happy about it on their own system.
> > none of them that I've seen so far have distinct glyphs for the curly
> > quotes.
> Again, distinct glyphs are not a requirement for ordinary Emacs users.
Again, we just don't know this one way or the other. Anyway I thought
we'd agreed on the WYSIWYG principle. With this aliasing, WYS is
ambiguous, WYG is not.
> That being said, for Emacs developers such as yourself, the
> Lat15-Terminus16 font I mentioned earlier has distinct glyphs for
> curved quotes, as does Lat15-TerminusBold16. You can find them
> archived at <http://bugs.gnu.org/20707>. There are many other choices
> in this area.
Yes, but of the standard fonts (i.e., those distributed in the kbd
GNU/Linux package) I'm not sure there're any with distinct glyphs for
curly quotes. I think whatever happens, messing around with fonts would
be needed for lots of console users.
> > That easiness remains controversial.
> It's certainly easier to read text quoted ‘like this’ than to read text
> quoted
> \`like this\'.
Yes, but marginally so. It's not easier to type it, electric-quote-mode
notwithstanding. Nobody's ever complained about \"like this\" in a
string. We all cope with far worse in complicated regular expressions.
> > To be useful, it would have to become the standard way of quoting
> > symbols.
> I doubt whether it'll be the standard. It's uglier and more complicated than
> the alternative. Its main advantage is that it's easier to type for users
> who
> want to type only ASCII.
The main advantage is that it would allow users to chose whether they want
curly quotes routinely in their doc strings.
How about another approach - leave the doc strings as they are, and
translate `foo-bar' to ?foo-bar? when doing C-h f/v, and so on? `..' is
used in doc strings mainly for quoting _symbols_, and it may well be that
that's the only use of this quoting style. Making this enhancement would
certainly be less work than changing several tens of thousands of
`foo-bar's in the source code.
> > Where do you see any portability hassles?
> Code might work when running on a typical Emacs system, but might fail on an
> Emacs system configured --without-curved-quotes, because Emacs will generate
> different strings that will be treated differently.
I can't see that. There'd just be displayable characters in the two
versions - why would it matter that they were different? Maybe if the
string were being passed to `read', there could be a difference, but in
that case it's the curly-quote version which is more likely to be
erroneous.
> > What exactly do you mean by "display problems fixed"?
> On the rare systems that don't display curved quotes as quotes, Emacs should
> display straight quotes as substitutes. That's good enough for these rare
> and
> obsolescent systems.
OK. I don't agree with this approach, of course.
> > I don't think it's TRT simply to curlify any quote typed within a string
> Electric Quote mode doesn't do that. If you type an apostrophe, it normally
> leaves the apostrophe alone. And in the rare cases where one really wants a
> grave accent and not a left single quote, it's easy enough to type C-q `.
OK. I hadn't tried typing just apostrophes. Sorry.
[ .... ]
--
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).
- bug#20707: [PROPOSED PATCH] Use curved quoting in C-generated errors, (continued)
- bug#20707: [PROPOSED PATCH] Use curved quoting in C-generated errors, Alan Mackenzie, 2015/06/09
- bug#20707: [PROPOSED PATCH] Use curved quoting in C-generated errors, Paul Eggert, 2015/06/09
- bug#20707: [PROPOSED PATCH] Use curved quoting in C-generated errors, Alan Mackenzie, 2015/06/10
- bug#20707: [PROPOSED PATCH] Use curved quoting in C-generated errors, Paul Eggert, 2015/06/10
- bug#20707: [PROPOSED PATCH] Use curved quoting in C-generated errors, Dmitry Gutov, 2015/06/10
- bug#20707: [PROPOSED PATCH] Use curved quoting in C-generated errors, Paul Eggert, 2015/06/10
- bug#20707: [PROPOSED PATCH] Use curved quoting in C-generated errors, Alan Mackenzie, 2015/06/10
- bug#20707: [PROPOSED PATCH] Use curved quoting in C-generated errors, Paul Eggert, 2015/06/10
- bug#20707: [PROPOSED PATCH] Use curved quoting in C-generated errors, Alan Mackenzie, 2015/06/11
- bug#20707: [PROPOSED PATCH] Use curved quoting in C-generated errors, Paul Eggert, 2015/06/11
- bug#20707: [PROPOSED PATCH] Use curved quoting in C-generated errors,
Alan Mackenzie <=
- bug#20707: [PROPOSED PATCH] Use curved quoting in C-generated errors, Paul Eggert, 2015/06/12
- bug#20707: [PROPOSED PATCH] Use curved quoting in C-generated errors, Alan Mackenzie, 2015/06/13
- bug#20707: [PROPOSED PATCH] Use curved quoting in C-generated errors, Paul Eggert, 2015/06/13
- bug#20707: [PROPOSED PATCH] Use curved quoting in C-generated errors, Wolfgang Jenkner, 2015/06/07
- bug#20707: [PROPOSED PATCH] Use curved quoting in C-generated errors, Alan Mackenzie, 2015/06/09
- bug#20707: [PROPOSED PATCH] Use curved quoting in C-generated errors, Paul Eggert, 2015/06/02
bug#20707: [PROPOSED PATCH] Use curved quoting in C-generated errors, Eli Zaretskii, 2015/06/01