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

[Paul Eggert]

Richard Stallman wrote:
> The full conventions for doc strings are definitely not
> part of the rudiments.

True, but quoting is pretty elementary.  Most doc strings use it, I daresay. 
For example, the doc strings for ‘car’, ‘cdr’, and ‘length’ all use quoting. 
These are the sorts of doc strings that new users are likely to see.

I agree with you, by the way, that the improvement due to using curved quotes is 
not a large one.  Emacs's use of an obsolescent quoting style is merely a 
constant minor annoyance, and it's obviously something that we can work around 
when we teach Emacs to students -- we can even give them a little history lesson 
as we go.  It's just one minor way that Emacs appears old-fashioned.  Obviously 
there are other, bigger ways, but I'm working on this one primarily because I 
finally got annoyed enough with it enough to invest the time to fix it, and 
because it's a minor task that I can tackle a bit at a time.