RE: ASCII-only startup message?

[Drew Adams <drew.adams@oracle.com>]

> > So as the only demonstration of your claim that this character is
> > not maintained in Unicode for compatibility between "apostrophe"
> > and "right single quotation mark", you offer the statement that
> > the name is wrong.
> 
> Drew Adams writes:
> > These are (should be) different animals and
> > they need not always have the same glyphs.
> 
> As long as we're on the subject of whose claims are assertions without
> evidence, can you produce a single example of a system that actually
> supported using different glyphs for these (apart from the typewriter
> glyph, which isn't typographically appropriate for anything), and what
> those glyphs might have looked like?

I never made such a claim.

Not only have I not said that the glyphs need to be different
or have been different, I have explicitly said that the glyphs
can be the same even when the uses are different.  They could
be (yes it's a choice) considered different characters based on
their different uses, and not on their different appearances.

What I have said is that an apostrophe is not a quotation mark.
They have different jobs.  An apostrophe is used within a word.
Quotation marks are used around/between words.

Here is one linguist's interesting take, BTW: the apostrophe
is the 27th English letter!

  The apostrophe is not a punctuation mark. It doesn't punctuate.
  Punctuation marks are placed between units (sentences, clauses,
  phrases, words, morphemes) to signal structure, boundaries, or
  pauses. The apostrophe appears within words. It's a 27th letter
  of the alphabet. This issue concerns spelling.
  http://chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca/2013/03/22/being-an-apostrophe/
  and http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2664

> And, lest we get off the subject, The reason not to use U+2019 or any
> other non-ASCII character in the default scratch buffer text is because
> the user may not be able to save it, not because the ASCII one is more
> typographically or semantically appropriate.

That is part of the argument I made more generally for ' (U+0027):
ease of use by users of a text editor and programming environment.

I am not the one arguing that it should be used because it is
more beautiful (though I don't personally think it is less
beautiful, in the default fonts and the fonts I use).  Relative
beauty was given as a reason only by those in favor of U+2019.

I've been pretty clear that the reason to use it is to make
life easier for users - in several ways.