Re: Change of Lisp syntax for "fancy" quotes in Emacs 27?

[Paul Eggert]

On 10/5/18 1:43 AM, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> the commonly accepted mechanism of
> pointing out potentially wrong constructs is by visual cues and
> warning messages

If we decide that Elisp source code must be able to abuse confusable 
characters, then of course we should allow such abuse and support it as 
best we can, including selective highlighting and whatnot to try to warn 
readers of the abuse. Such support won't work outside Emacs, but people 
using non-Emacs programs to look at Elisp code will simply be out of luck.

However, that would be heading in the wrong direction, because we 
shouldn't assume that Elisp code is reviewed only via Emacs. I regularly 
use Savannah's web interface to look at Elisp source code diffs, for 
example, and there's lots of other ways I and other developers use 
non-Emacs programs to look at Elisp source. Because reading source code 
is an essential property of free software, and because it would set a 
bad precedent if we said or implied that one really should use only 
Emacs to read Elisp code, we can't sufficiently address the problem 
merely by highlighting characters when Emacs is viewing them in a 
certain way and saying or implying that people should use only Emacs to 
review Elisp code.

I'm not arguing that Elisp should prohibit symbols from containing 
confusing characters, only that these characters should be easily 
recognizable in plain-text source code, without requiring Emacs itself 
(configured a certain way) to view the source. For example, if we 
required a backslash before every confusable character in a symbol, that 
would go a long way toward addressing the problem.