Re: quotation characters in the Octave sources

[Michael D Godfrey]

On 6/24/19 9:01 PM, John W. Eaton wrote:
> Recently I've noticed the use of various characters for quotation 
> marks in the Octave sources, including ASCII apostrophe, grave accent, 
> acute accent, and Unicode left/right single quotation marks.  I'd like 
> to come up with a uniform guideline for these characters, fix the 
> sources, and try to stick with it in the future.
>
> A complete discussion of the issue may be found here
>
> https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/quotes.html
>
> Briefly, in the old days, we used `' (ASCII grave and acute accents) 
> when surrounding words with single quote characters.  It wasn't 
> correct usage, but they were displayed by X11 as left/right single 
> quotation characters and I think Texinfo also displayed them as 
> matched quotation characters, so they appeared to be the right thing 
> and were easily accessible characters on US/ASCII keyboards.  But then 
> X11 changed and these characters are now displayed (correctly) as 
> grave accent (slanted) and apostrophe (neutral) so in addition to 
> being the wrong combination of characters, they look terrible together.
>
> Once that change was made, I think we started simply using the ascii 
> apostrophe character like 'this'.  I'd like to fix the sources to use 
> that convention again.  Does anyone object or have a better 
> suggestion? No matter what we decide, I'd like to have consistent 
> usage in the source files.
>
> jwe
John,

Good to try to standardize. I tend toward ' ', but an expert friend says:

"As an American I use double quotes for first level. Also " is the same for open and 
close. ASCII 68 introduced open quote (back tick), but ' does not really close `."

Also, I wrote a couple of TeX macros to provide ' ' in Tex.

So, your choice seems OK.
Michael