Re: `' quotes in messages

[Paul Eggert]

   From: Russ Allbery <address@hidden>
   Date: 26 Oct 2000 17:05:05 -0700

   > On a tangent, do we still want to use `...' quotes?

   See <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/quotes.html> for an extensive
   argument on this subject which convinced me, even though I'm really
   annoyed by it.

It convinced me too, at first.  But then I tried to convert GNU tar to
use the more "standard" quotes.  This turned into a real mess, and was
the topic of extended controversy on the gnits mailing list.  The
consensus opinion, which I gradually came to share, was to leave well
enough alone.  So this week I spent an unhappy hour or two undoing the
damage by reverting to the `traditional GNU quotes' in GNU tar.

I assume that we're talking about US-ASCII English here.  If we're
talking about non-English US-ASCII text (like shell source code) then
obviously one should use whatever US-ASCII character is appropriate.
And if we are talking about Unicode/ISO10646/etc English, then it's
clear that one should avoid the three characters `, ', and ", as none
of those Unicode characters are used in ordinary English text.

For some reason the whole subject reminds me of RS-232 connectors....