Re: \201 irritation! :-)

["François Pinard" <pinard@iro.umontreal.ca>]

[Florian Weimer]

> Kai.Grossjohann@CS.Uni-Dortmund.DE (Kai Großjohann) writes:

> > > BTW: Please do not abuse GRAVE ACCENT (U+0060) as quotation mark.
> > > Thanks.

Where did you get that this is an abuse?  ASCII meant it as symmetric to
acute accent, and so does Unicode, by leaving the grave accent and especially
the apostrophe as ambiguous as either an apostrophe or an acute accent.
There are separate, more specific Unicode points for non-ambiguous usage.

My feeling is that people are tempted to consider it as an abuse, because
they use fonts in which the apostrophe stands right, instead of being
symmetrical to U+0060.  They should rather consider the fonts as wrong, since
the symmetry is not preserved.  The fonts should be corrected, not the usage.

> The code which renders the help messages would have to be changed,
> nothing else.

This is being done in some places.  Some make a great fuss around all this.

> I think using these characters in source code (TeX, Texinfo, Lisp,
> Shell) is acceptable, but presenting them to the user should be
> reconsidered (at least in a few years, when Unicode fonts are in more
> widespread use, so you can use the quotation mark characters from
> the,).

So called Unicode fonts should be ASCII fonts for that little part where
Unicode and ASCII coincide.  Of course, if you make Unicode to differ from
ASCII in that region, you create yourself, and everybody, a lot of problems.

Many people frantically want to go Unicode.  But strangely, some are
reluctant to Unicode outside the first 127 characters, and want things
to be changed consequently.  It would better if Unicode people were using
Unicode, while leaving ASCII alone.  Moreover, it was meant that way.

-- 
François Pinard   http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~pinard