Racket: quotes in import look weird

[shriram]

When you import from a module named by a string, you get this:

The double quotes, and of two different kinds of quotes, all looks rather ugly. Since quotes already have a special meaning in that position (and the typographical differences between different kinds of quotes are lost on some people), why not use a different marker for the outer quotes instead, like «ducks feet»?

[sorawee]

This is how @shriram's suggestion looks. Not sure if it's better or worse...

[jackfirth]

Why not just drop the outer quotes entirely when the inner module is a quoted string? So it would say imported from "a.rkt".

[rfindler]

Another thing we could do is add styling information so the "a.rkt" would be in TT font. (We would probably want to loop in @greghendershott to get the best tradeoff between backwards compatibility and making things work with Emacs mode if we go this route.)

[greghendershott]

I agree it looks weird.

Personally, I think the best fix is simply to remove the fancy quotes.

(So that whatever follows "imported by " is simply the text you'd see in Racket source. Although I _usually_ ~dis~like fancy formatting :smile:, I think the context makes it clear that the text must be a module name, even if it is plain text.)

---

When I encountered this, I decided just to "cleanse" it on my, consuming end:

    (define/override (syncheck:add-mouse-over-status _text beg end status)
      (when (valid-beg/end? beg end)
        ;; Avoid silly "imported from “\"file.rkt\"”"
        (define cleansed (regexp-replace* #px"[“””]" status ""))
        (interval-map-update*! im-mouse-overs beg end
                               (λ (s) (set-add s cleansed))
                               (set cleansed))

I probably should have filed an issue here, to ask about the intent. But I think at the time I was juggling a dozen things getting this working, and forgot.

Anyway, this "cleansing" would work fine if you simply omit the fancy quotes. It would continue to help with older versions of drracket/check-syntax, and simply be harmless and N/A for newer versions.

[rfindler]

Just removing the quotes works for me.

Robby

[shriram]

Removing the extra quotes also meets the standard of "what you see is what you type" (as Greg said), which is of a piece with constructor printing (a principle we've generally liked).

[greghendershott]

Although I am sure we all agree that in #lang rhombus string literals using fancy quotes should produce an EBCDIC encoded string type... I will open a separate issue for that.