bug#30217: Ambiguity in NEWS in emacs-26.0.91

[Noam Postavsky]

Drew Adams <drew.adams@oracle.com> writes:

>> In the new NEWS in the recent pretest, at L1381 we have:
>> 
>>     ** To avoid confusion caused by "smart quotes", the reader no longer
>>     accepts Lisp symbols which begin with the following quotation
>>     characters: `'""   , unless they are escaped with backslash.
>>                                      ^^^^
>> 
>> , which leaves it unclear whether it's the "smart quotes" or the Lisp
>> symbols which need escaping.

> Even if that ambiguity gets resolved, I have no idea what
> the text means.  What does it mean for the Lisp reader to
> "accept a Lisp symbol"?
>
> Please describe exactly what the reader does when it reads
> one of those characters followed by Lisp-symbol syntax, in
> both cases: char escaped and char not escaped.

How about this:

    ** To avoid confusion caused by "smart quotes", the reader signals an
    error when reading Lisp symbols which begin with one of the following
    quotation characters: ‘’‛“”‟〞＂＇.  A symbol beginning with such a
    character can be written by escaping the quotation character with a
    backslash.  For example:

        (read "‘smart") => Lisp error: (invalid-read-syntax "strange quote" "‘")
        (read "\\‘smart") == (intern "‘smart")