Re: Upcoming loss of usability of Emacs source files and Emacs.

[Oleh Krehel <ohwoeowho@gmail.com>]

Nikolai Weibull <now@disu.se> writes:

> On Tue, Jun 23, 2015 at 1:40 PM, Dmitry Gutov <dgutov@yandex.ru> wrote:
>> On 06/23/2015 06:16 AM, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
>
>> As Andreas mentioned before, not every native English speaker is accustomed
>> to them, and certainly not most of the people for whom English is not a
>> native language.
>
> It’s probably not worth noting, but that can’t possible be true.  Is
> someone who sees ‘‘’ going to wonder what that symbol means, whereas
> if they see ‘'’ they’ll go “aha!”?

From my perspective (English isn't my mother-tongue), it's totally true.

Honestly, it's very weird to see "It’s" written by you, when I'm used to
seeing "It's" in all electronic media (which accounts for 100% of my
English usage). The only place where I think "It’s" is appropriate
instead of "It's" is a LaTeX-typeset PDF document: not HTML, not email,
not social media, not Info, and certainly not source code. And even in
LaTeX ASCII is used to typeset these characters for the simple reason
that they are present on 95% of the keyboards with an English layout.

Same thing goes for “aha!”. I actually remember seeing these type of
quotes (very rarely) even before I have learned Emacs. And I recall
being super-annoyed that my regular quotes that I had just learned how
to insert with my keyboard looked different. At that point, I had no
idea about ASCII or Unicode, or programming, and knew only the basics of
computer interaction, such as using the keyboard and the clipboard.