Re: master ff4de1b: Fix quoting style in Lisp comments

[Yuri Khan]

On Fri, 17 Sept 2021 at 19:32, Gregory Heytings <gregory@heytings.org> wrote:

> Except that doing this throws the baby out with the bathwater.  If some
> think it looks ugly, it is IMO better to make it look better, instead of
> stopping to use it.  Because it's much easier to parse (as a pair) than
> double apostrophes.  It's a historical accident that ASCII included paired
> {} () [] <>, but no paired quotation marks.

It’s a historical accident that the typewriter character set conflated
the opening single quote, closing single quote, apostrophe, acute
accent, and single prime. It is also a historical accident that the
grave accent ` was born as a separate spacing character at all — and
that is why I, among others, consider it ugly. Both these accidents
are canonically fixed by Unicode.

In my opinion, it is a mistake to avoid Unicode characters for the
reason that some terminals cannot display them. Teach those terminals
to map them to dumb quotes instead. Also, if Unicode quotation marks
are hard to enter, push for better keyboard layouts. (Personally, I
have all of “”‘’…–—«»°®©™≤≥§−±×÷≈ in my AltGr layer.)