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Re: [Emacs-diffs] emacs-25 26b56dc: Fix some single quotes in documentat
From: |
Paul Eggert |
Subject: |
Re: [Emacs-diffs] emacs-25 26b56dc: Fix some single quotes in documentation |
Date: |
Wed, 16 Mar 2016 16:37:33 -0700 |
User-agent: |
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:38.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/38.6.0 |
On 03/16/2016 02:26 PM, Drew Adams wrote:
>They were used, and they weren't typos.
Show us some that were not typos, please.
You want more examples? OK, here are a few in etc/NEWS.24:
1919:**** Improved support for 'extern "C"' declarations in C/C++.
1922:such as '__nonnull' and '__asm'. Add '__cplusplus' macro when
parsing C++.
1931:**** Support for the Python 'WITH' and 'AT' keywords.
and in etc/NEWS before this week's changes:
90:** The configure option '--with-gameuser' now allows you to
specify a
91:group instead of a user if its argument is prefixed by ':' (a
colon).
94:be installed setgid. The option now defaults to the 'games' group.
There are more where these came from. These are not typos; they're the
straight quoting style. Admittedly they are a minority of NEWS lines,
but my impression is that the style's prevalence was growing in
more-recent NEWS entries, even before this week's changes. And that's
understandable, as the GNU coding standards in this area were changed
relatively recently (compared to the entire Emacs timeline, that is).
You wouldn't happen to know who started down
that road, would you?
Markus Kuhn's web page on the topic
<https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/quotes.html> says that ISO 8859-1
specified the current behavior where ` and ' are not symmetric; before
that, ASCII was ambiguous and many displays used symmetric quotes. ISO
8859-1 was derived from ECMA-94, which was developed sometime in the
early 1980s by the ANSI X3L2 Technical Committee on Codes and Character
Sets. So it appears that ANSI/X3L2 bears at least some of the
responsibility for the road we're traveling on.
Personally I prefer symmetric quotes, and wish that ANSI/X3L2 had chosen
otherwise. But we can't reasonably expect to change how Unicode works in
this area.
- Re: [Emacs-diffs] emacs-25 26b56dc: Fix some single quotes in documentation, (continued)
- Re: [Emacs-diffs] emacs-25 26b56dc: Fix some single quotes in documentation, John Wiegley, 2016/03/14
- Re: [Emacs-diffs] emacs-25 26b56dc: Fix some single quotes in documentation, Paul Eggert, 2016/03/14
- Re: [Emacs-diffs] emacs-25 26b56dc: Fix some single quotes in documentation, John Wiegley, 2016/03/15
- Re: [Emacs-diffs] emacs-25 26b56dc: Fix some single quotes in documentation, Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen, 2016/03/15
- RE: [Emacs-diffs] emacs-25 26b56dc: Fix some single quotes in documentation, Drew Adams, 2016/03/15
- Re: [Emacs-diffs] emacs-25 26b56dc: Fix some single quotes in documentation, Paul Eggert, 2016/03/15
- RE: [Emacs-diffs] emacs-25 26b56dc: Fix some single quotes in documentation, Drew Adams, 2016/03/15
- Re: [Emacs-diffs] emacs-25 26b56dc: Fix some single quotes in documentation, John Wiegley, 2016/03/16
- Re: [Emacs-diffs] emacs-25 26b56dc: Fix some single quotes in documentation, Paul Eggert, 2016/03/16
- RE: [Emacs-diffs] emacs-25 26b56dc: Fix some single quotes in documentation, Drew Adams, 2016/03/16
- Re: [Emacs-diffs] emacs-25 26b56dc: Fix some single quotes in documentation,
Paul Eggert <=
- RE: [Emacs-diffs] emacs-25 26b56dc: Fix some single quotes in documentation, Drew Adams, 2016/03/16
- Re: [Emacs-diffs] emacs-25 26b56dc: Fix some single quotes in documentation, Alan Mackenzie, 2016/03/14
- Re: [Emacs-diffs] emacs-25 26b56dc: Fix some single quotes in documentation, Paul Eggert, 2016/03/14
- Re: [Emacs-diffs] emacs-25 26b56dc: Fix some single quotes in documentation, Kaushal Modi, 2016/03/14
- Re: [Emacs-diffs] emacs-25 26b56dc: Fix some single quotes in documentation, Dmitry Gutov, 2016/03/14
- RE: [Emacs-diffs] emacs-25 26b56dc: Fix some single quotes in documentation, Drew Adams, 2016/03/14
- Re: [Emacs-diffs] emacs-25 26b56dc: Fix some single quotes in documentation, John Wiegley, 2016/03/14
- Re: [Emacs-diffs] emacs-25 26b56dc: Fix some single quotes in documentation, Dmitry Gutov, 2016/03/14
Re: [Emacs-diffs] emacs-25 26b56dc: Fix some single quotes in documentation, Eli Zaretskii, 2016/03/14