Markus Kuhn writes:
: If you use any software that writes `quote', please submit to the author
: a patch and point her to the above URL for background information. Thanks!
Please note that if you "fix" the m4 program this way it'll break. I
think the m4 style of quoting preceded any similar TeX, GNU or X Windows
usage by quite a long time, and quite possibly led to those other
usages. At least, m4 is the first place I ever saw that style of
quoting used pervasively.
Also, please don't "fix" programs like Perl or the shells, which don't
use `quote' style, but rather `quote` style. So any fix like
perl -pi.bak -e "s/\`/'/g;" file1 file2 ...
is going to have extremely bad consequences in those programs.
Frankly, I think you're going to run into a lot of people who feel as
strongly about their quotes as you feel about newlines. That is,
to paraphrase your newline article:
While the POSIX world is in need of a new character encoding, it is
definitely not in need of new quote semantics. The two are fully
orthogonal issues, and the Unicode standard has nothing useful to
offer for POSIX on the quote issue.
Mind you, that's not my opinion, exactly. I'm considerably more easy
going on the subject. But I think there will be others who are harder
going, and I'm playing devil's advocate here. Standards aside, is
there any *actual* use of grave and acute accents in a symmetrical
`quote' fashion? Or is it merely notional? Surely under Unicode most
real accents will be combining or composed characters. So why inflict a
most unused symmetry condition on people who are using an actual symmetry?
I don't think quoting standards is gonna cut it for the folks who feel
strongly about that. You're likely to have a cultural war on your hands.
Me, I'm neutral, but I'll be glad to trade with both sides...
Larry
