unicode encoding and curly quotes [was: How to open a file in sh-mode]

[Xah <xahlee@gmail.com>]

David Combs wrote:
> Xah-- question about the characters in your posts:
>
> If I or someone sees eg a url in one of your posts, and
> wants to go to that url (because you've suggested doing that,
> maybe), it's a little difficult to just cut-n-paste your string,
> what with all the extra control or whatever they are characters
> mixed in.
>
> What is that stuff, why is it there, and is it really necessary
> for you to include it.

The summation sign “∑” in my sig is my and my website signet.

in the end of my sig, there's this character “☄” (unicode name
“comet”). It is there so that it forces groups.google.com and Apple
Mail application into sending the message with unicode encoding.
Otherwise, the heuristics'll typically pick Japanese encoding. (in
google groups, last i checked about last year there's no way to set
encoding. And in Apple Mail 2 years ago, there's no unicode encoding
option... it is added now but last i checked there's no preference
that can set encoding ... )

My use of curly quotes “ ” or other unicode chars are just convenience
and practical need. I have in my emacs various easy ways to type them.
The need to quote is for example, seen throughout gnu's docs, but they
used a ascii cludge of backtick for left curly single quote and
straight quote for right curly single quote, e.g. “`something'”.
(quoting is needed for highlighting purporses or to make a phrase's
semantic from normal interpretation in the sentence.)

Since about 2006, i find emacs's support of unicode very roburst and i
have no problem with these and other mathematical chars or chinese in
emacs. In general, opensource langs and tools in e.g. linux world has
much caught on and support unicode, and i think that is good.
(commercial world long ago supported and use these chars in practice
(e.g. Apple in early 1990s and Microsoft Windows since about WindowsNT
4 or Windows2000)) The OpenSource world typically has a lag of 5 to 10
years in catching up most desktop techs. Even today, there are still a
few cave dwelling tech geekers you'll see occationally complaint about
unicode in posts (e.g. Alan M here insists that newsgroup posts should
be in ascii only!). But thankfully these days you'll often see others
tech geekers follow up chiding about the complainer like “dude, get a
proper newsreader” ...

You FreeSoftware and OpenSource supporters really should move on and
embrace unicode.

I have made few suggestions here and elsewhere in the past 2 years
including several private exchanges with Richard Stallman, about
updating emacs doc (and in general all GNU docs convention) to to use
“” and ‘’ in place of painful and ugly and technically problematic and
ambiguous ascii kludge `', among few other modernization issues... but
in general it's met with extreme difficulty...

i've been wanting to file a emacs bug report on this particular
issue ... but with so many resistance and my “troll” persona etc ...
basically it's very disencouraging ...

The problem with `' or ``'' is that:

• it's just 1980's ascii kludge to get around the fact there were no
matching quotes in ascii. In some technical sense, it's misuse and
abuse of symbols.
• it's ugly.
• it's ambiguous. The straight quote has many meanings, and both
straight quote and backtick also has special meanings in elisp lang
and in function's inline doc string.
• it is not possible to do a syntactical parse. (compare it to quoting
with chars that are matching pairs.)

If you think there's some merit in this suggestion, please file a bug
report. (menu “Help‣Send Bug Report...”)

  Xah
∑ http://xahlee.org/

☄


> >-----------------------------------
> >How Emacs Choose Modes
>
> >Emacs determines what mode to use primarily by 2 mechanisms, in order:
> >(1) Check the first line in the file, using “magic-mode-alist”. (2)
> >Check the file name's suffix, using “auto-mode-alist”.
>
> >The “magic-mode-alist” is a list that emacs use to match the first
> >line of a file with a mode. For example, if you want files that begin
> >with the line “<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 ...” to
> >always use nxml-mode, then add the following to your “.emacs”:
>
> >(add-to-list
> > 'magic-mode-alist
> > '("<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC \"-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0" . nxml-mode))
>
> >The magic-mode-alist is a list. In the above example, the string with
> >the “DOCTYPE” is a regex, used to match the first line of a file.
>
> >If emacs goes thru magic-mode-alist and didn't find any match, then
> >it'll use auto-mode-alist to check on file name suffix. The “auto-mode-
> >alist” associates a file name suffix with a mode. For example, if you
> >want files ending in “.js” to always open with js2-mode, then do:
>
> >(add-to-list 'auto-mode-alist '("\\.js\\'" . js2-mode))
>
> >Note: The double backslash in the string “\\.js\\'” is used to escape
> >the backslash. So, the regex engine just got “\.js\'”. The “\.” is to
> >match a period. The “\'” is one of emacs special regex syntax, to
> >match end of a string. (See also: Text Pattern Matching in Emacs)
>
> >Reference: Elisp Manual: Regexp-Backslash.
>
> >You can see what are the values of magic-mode-alist or auto-mode-alist
> >by typing “Alt+x describe-variable”.
>
> >There are few minor details about how emacs determines what mode to
> >load, but the above should cover vast majority of needs. For detail,
> >see emacs manual.
>
> >Reference: (info "(emacs)Choosing Modes").
>
> >--------------------------------------------
> >above from:
> >http://xahlee.org/emacs/emacs_installing_packages.html
>
> >  Xah
> >∑http://xahlee.org/
>
> >☄