Re: [groff] 03/09: tmac/an-old.tmac: Stop remapping ` and '.

[Jan Stary]

On Nov 02 12:09:45, schwarze@usta.de wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Werner LEMBERG wrote on Mon, Nov 02, 2020 at 09:42:35AM +0100:
> 
> > To summarize: It seems that there is only a single platform left today
> > that by default uses a bitmap font for terminals with symmetric ` and
> > ' characters.  This sort-of proves my point, doesn't it?
> 
> I fear you missed the point.  What matters is that large numbers
> of manual pages use unescaped ' and ` to represent plain ASCII '
> and ` for programming language syntax documentation - because that
> has been supported in manual pages for more than a decade, because
> authors have become used to it, and because it seems likely that
> before 2008, not many people ever considered mon-ASCII output of
> manual pages.  So dropping support now gratuitiously breaks formatting
> of large numbers of manual pages in an important way, changing all
> existing pages would be a huge make-work project, and attempting
> to re-educate programmers is likely to alienate many of them.
> 
> The shape of glyphs in some fonts has nothing to do with the issues
> involved.
> 
> Admittedly, Jan could have chosen a less misleading example.  From
> the context of his mail, it appeared that he intended `that' as
> "ASCII backtick quote apostophe-quote" (even though that is
> ungrammatical in most programming languages i'm aware of), not as
> "that in single quotes".  An example like
> 
>   my_var=`sed 's/foo/bar/g' input.txt`
> 
> would have been less confusing.

Yes, my example is misleading - but this was my point.
Thank you.

        Jan