From: Paul Eggert <eggert@cs.ucla.edu>
To: Drew Adams <drew.adams@oracle.com>
Cc: emacs-devel@gnu.org
Subject: Re: [Emacs-diffs] emacs-25 26b56dc: Fix some single quotes in documentation
Date: Wed, 16 Mar 2016 16:37:33 -0700 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <56E9EE3D.5020000@cs.ucla.edu> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <510c885d-f4d3-4771-8caf-1d61711321e2@default>
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
<https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/quotes.html> 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.
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2016-03-16 23:37 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 38+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
[not found] <20160314154123.2684.74715@vcs.savannah.gnu.org>
[not found] ` <E1afUcV-0000iS-4N@vcs.savannah.gnu.org>
2016-03-14 15:44 ` [Emacs-diffs] emacs-25 26b56dc: Fix some single quotes in documentation John Wiegley
2016-03-14 16:31 ` Paul Eggert
2016-03-14 16:39 ` John Wiegley
2016-03-14 16:42 ` Dmitry Gutov
2016-03-14 17:19 ` Clément Pit--Claudel
2016-03-14 17:37 ` Dmitry Gutov
2016-03-14 17:53 ` Kaushal Modi
2016-03-14 18:10 ` Drew Adams
2016-03-14 18:32 ` Paul Eggert
2016-03-14 18:43 ` Eli Zaretskii
2016-03-14 18:48 ` John Wiegley
2016-03-14 18:58 ` Eli Zaretskii
2016-03-14 18:45 ` John Wiegley
2016-03-14 19:14 ` Paul Eggert
2016-03-14 19:29 ` John Wiegley
2016-03-14 20:47 ` Paul Eggert
2016-03-14 20:50 ` John Wiegley
2016-03-15 0:30 ` Paul Eggert
2016-03-15 22:21 ` John Wiegley
2016-03-15 23:13 ` Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen
2016-03-15 23:56 ` Drew Adams
2016-03-16 0:11 ` Paul Eggert
2016-03-16 0:52 ` Drew Adams
2016-03-16 8:16 ` John Wiegley
2016-03-16 17:55 ` Paul Eggert
2016-03-16 21:26 ` Drew Adams
2016-03-16 23:37 ` Paul Eggert [this message]
2016-03-16 23:41 ` Drew Adams
2016-03-14 20:56 ` Alan Mackenzie
2016-03-15 0:39 ` Paul Eggert
2016-03-14 18:50 ` Kaushal Modi
2016-03-14 19:11 ` Dmitry Gutov
2016-03-14 19:16 ` Drew Adams
2016-03-14 19:39 ` John Wiegley
2016-03-14 19:47 ` Dmitry Gutov
2016-03-14 17:03 ` Eli Zaretskii
2016-03-14 18:24 ` Paul Eggert
2016-03-14 18:42 ` Eli Zaretskii
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