Re: tick and backtick in unicode

[Karl Eichwalder <keichwa@gmx.net>]

François Pinard <pinard@iro.umontreal.ca> writes:

> I do not remember the text of ISO 8859-1, nor if it addresses that
> problem.

Markus explains that neither ASCII (ISO 646) nor ISO 8859-1 has left or
right quote characters (neither double nor single); it has a single and
a double quote you've to use to start and to end the quoted string.

ASCII has the grave accent ("back tick") and ISO 8859-1 has the cute
accent in addition.

Displaying the grave accent as a proper left single quote looks silly if
you've to read shell scripts -- okay, you better use $(COMMAND)...

> I'm using ETL fonts, which do something sensible.  I'm including a
> picture of a small part of this message composition buffer...

Me, too.  I was very pleased as I encountered these fonts the first
time (and still I am)!  It's nice but wrong, sadly ;-(

> In fact, Markus invited me to look at the Unicode
> reference, and this is what really convinced me that Unicode is really
> made to compatible with ASCII, including the ambiguous usage of the quote.

Yes, ASCII is ambiguous.  But the ETL fonts removing this ambiguity and
displaying the grave accent as a left single quote -- reading Emacs Lisp
code, it looks nice -- but it will confuse people in the long run!

> Yet, I still honestly think that the problem has been invented by font
> makers and later users, but is away from both Unicode and ASCII
> standards.

Yes, by the ETL font makers.  With ETL fonts I'm not able to display the
grave accent in an 8859-1 environment.

Id' say it's still feasible to use these `quotation technique' for Emacs
Lisp comments, but not for shell scripts nor for program message
considered to be read by the user.

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