Re: tick and backtick in unicode

[Kai.Grossjohann@CS.Uni-Dortmund.DE (Kai Großjohann)]

On Wed, 29 Nov 2000, Karl Eichwalder wrote:

> 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

Are you saying that under your interpretation there is no way in
Unicode to display left and right single quotes?  IMVHO, such an
interpretation is silly, since the English speaking people have been
using left and right single (or double) quotes for ages to mark direct
speach and the like.  Removing these characters from Ascii or Latin-1
(or Unicode) means that it is not possible to express normal English
text using that encoding.  And surely we do not want to dumb down the
encoding in such a way that it becomes impossible to do that?

FWIW, TeX also uses `single quotes' like this.  By saying this, I mean
that when you provide TeX with an input that has `single quotes', then
the output will contain a single left and a single right quote.

I think it is not useful to make fonts such that TeX input looks
asymmetrical, nor such that Emacs Lisp code looks asymmetrical.

And I don't believe that shell code looks silly with left and right
quotes at all, no more silly than with grave and acute accents.

kai
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