Re: master ff4de1b: Fix quoting style in Lisp comments

[Gregory Heytings <gregory@heytings.org>]

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>> Except that doing this throws the baby out with the bathwater.  If some 
>> think it looks ugly, it is IMO better to make it look better, instead 
>> of stopping to use it.  Because it's much easier to parse (as a pair) 
>> than double apostrophes.  It's a historical accident that ASCII 
>> included paired {} () [] <>, but no paired quotation marks.
>
> It’s a historical accident that the typewriter character set conflated 
> the opening single quote, closing single quote, apostrophe, acute 
> accent, and single prime. It is also a historical accident that the 
> grave accent ` was born as a separate spacing character at all — and 
> that is why I, among others, consider it ugly. Both these accidents are 
> canonically fixed by Unicode.
>

The point is not to discuss whether Unicode makes a better distinction 
between different kinds of quotation marks and apostrophe.  It does, 
obviously.  But (1) these characters are difficult to enter on most 
keyboards, (2) it is not realistic to expect that keyboards will change, 
as 99.9% users do not need or even understand those subtleties, and word 
processors already do TRT when they press the " or ' keys, and (3) more 
importantly, using `foobar' is better than using any of these Unicode 
characters, because ` and ' are logical quotation marks or markups that 
can be displayed as any of the actual quotation marks depending on the 
user preferences.  Some will prefer ‛foobar’, others ‘foobar’, others 
‟foobar”, others “foobar”, others 'foobar', and so forth.