From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Path: news.gmane.org!not-for-mail From: Paul Eggert Newsgroups: gmane.emacs.devel Subject: Re: [Emacs-diffs] emacs-25 26b56dc: Fix some single quotes in documentation Date: Wed, 16 Mar 2016 16:37:33 -0700 Organization: UCLA Computer Science Department Message-ID: <56E9EE3D.5020000@cs.ucla.edu> References: <20160314154123.2684.74715@vcs.savannah.gnu.org> <56E6E764.9090500@cs.ucla.edu> <89ba6063-e962-7590-39be-c4fb28f394ea@yandex.ru> <56E703D9.8000607@cs.ucla.edu> <56E70D7C.9080709@cs.ucla.edu> <56E7235A.8010305@cs.ucla.edu> <56E757B6.1010905@cs.ucla.edu> <56E8A49C.6050704@cs.ucla.edu> <124b0893-9ed5-4532-8ade-619609973117@default> <56E99E23.4090506@cs.ucla.edu> <510c885d-f4d3-4771-8caf-1d61711321e2@default> NNTP-Posting-Host: plane.gmane.org Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Trace: ger.gmane.org 1458171489 10310 80.91.229.3 (16 Mar 2016 23:38:09 GMT) X-Complaints-To: usenet@ger.gmane.org NNTP-Posting-Date: Wed, 16 Mar 2016 23:38:09 +0000 (UTC) Cc: emacs-devel@gnu.org To: Drew Adams Original-X-From: emacs-devel-bounces+ged-emacs-devel=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Thu Mar 17 00:37:58 2016 Return-path: Envelope-to: ged-emacs-devel@m.gmane.org Original-Received: from lists.gnu.org ([208.118.235.17]) by plane.gmane.org with esmtp (Exim 4.69) (envelope-from ) id 1agL0m-0005qj-DI for ged-emacs-devel@m.gmane.org; Thu, 17 Mar 2016 00:37:56 +0100 Original-Received: from localhost ([::1]:59302 helo=lists.gnu.org) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1agL0l-0007YA-Hf for ged-emacs-devel@m.gmane.org; Wed, 16 Mar 2016 19:37:55 -0400 Original-Received: from eggs.gnu.org ([2001:4830:134:3::10]:52487) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1agL0X-0007WU-91 for emacs-devel@gnu.org; Wed, 16 Mar 2016 19:37:42 -0400 Original-Received: from Debian-exim by eggs.gnu.org with spam-scanned (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1agL0U-0006Tj-2K for emacs-devel@gnu.org; Wed, 16 Mar 2016 19:37:41 -0400 Original-Received: from zimbra.cs.ucla.edu ([131.179.128.68]:60477) by eggs.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1agL0T-0006T7-SL for emacs-devel@gnu.org; Wed, 16 Mar 2016 19:37:37 -0400 Original-Received: from localhost (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by zimbra.cs.ucla.edu (Postfix) with ESMTP id 18437160E65; Wed, 16 Mar 2016 16:37:36 -0700 (PDT) Original-Received: from zimbra.cs.ucla.edu ([127.0.0.1]) by localhost (zimbra.cs.ucla.edu [127.0.0.1]) (amavisd-new, port 10032) with ESMTP id qLT496xExJRM; Wed, 16 Mar 2016 16:37:34 -0700 (PDT) Original-Received: from localhost (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by zimbra.cs.ucla.edu (Postfix) with ESMTP id 3C946160E84; Wed, 16 Mar 2016 16:37:34 -0700 (PDT) X-Virus-Scanned: amavisd-new at zimbra.cs.ucla.edu Original-Received: from zimbra.cs.ucla.edu ([127.0.0.1]) by localhost (zimbra.cs.ucla.edu [127.0.0.1]) (amavisd-new, port 10026) with ESMTP id PafKRIwbZ8yh; Wed, 16 Mar 2016 16:37:34 -0700 (PDT) Original-Received: from penguin.cs.ucla.edu (Penguin.CS.UCLA.EDU [131.179.64.200]) by zimbra.cs.ucla.edu (Postfix) with ESMTPSA id 22BC1160E65; Wed, 16 Mar 2016 16:37:34 -0700 (PDT) User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:38.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/38.6.0 In-Reply-To: <510c885d-f4d3-4771-8caf-1d61711321e2@default> X-detected-operating-system: by eggs.gnu.org: GNU/Linux 3.x X-Received-From: 131.179.128.68 X-BeenThere: emacs-devel@gnu.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.14 Precedence: list List-Id: "Emacs development discussions." List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Errors-To: emacs-devel-bounces+ged-emacs-devel=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Original-Sender: emacs-devel-bounces+ged-emacs-devel=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Xref: news.gmane.org gmane.emacs.devel:201805 Archived-At: 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 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.