Re: ASCII-only startup message?

["Per Starbäck" <per@starback.se>]

>> Unicode has muddle[d] it further by bad names for these
>> characters. I think ascii ' should have a name similar to ascii -
>> (HYPHEN-MINUS) which shows that this is something used as a stand-in
>> for several different characters.
>
> Yes.  And not just the names.  Unicode too has a single stand-in for
> multiple (2) characters.  A single Unicode character is apparently
> meant (recommended) to represent both the apostrophe and the right
> single quotation mark.

I don't agree. It *is* one character that is used in several ways, in
that typographical traditional sees them as the same character.
(Important for Unicode is also that no previous character set
differentiated between them, because then it would have to as well, by
its design decisions.)

That one character has several meanings, as the exclamation mark "!"
also means factorial doesn't mean it needs to be seen as two
characters. Even when there are such "double characters" in Unicode
often you are recommended to only use one of them anyway. That's the
case with U+00E5 "ANGSTROM SIGN" where you normally instead use the
letter Å (LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A WITH RING ABOVE, U+00C5) instead.

I suspect that the thought that the apostrophe is "another" character
than one of the curly quotes wouldn't at all be so strong if the
Unicode name for ' wasn't APOSTROPHE but instead was TYPEWRITER SINGLE
QUOTATION MARK.