On 2014-06-14 at 16:51, Yuri Khan wrote:
> The GCC error messages in the en_US.utf8 locale, on the other hand, do
> use curly quotes.

Indeed, just because “computer English” is made for computers, not human
beings, who prefer to have readable text, just like it was before
typewriters.

> OK, I do not suggest that Perl should drop its backtick operator or
> that computer languages universally start using curly quotes for
> character and string literals (although that would make many languages
> more elegant by simplifying parsing). But how about we reserve all
> these artificial characters for computer languages, one of which
> English is not.

Having more language neutral programming languages would be cool, even
languages based on semantic interpretation of binary data that would
move the complexity of syntactic representation of its content from data
toward editor would be really more useful, clean, simple, egalitarian,
etc.

> Otherwise, primarily, the material will be read by a human being, and
> only secondarily in a computer program. I wish for a future where the
> Web replaces the printed book, therefore, the Web must do all things
> books do, and then some.

I hope that by “the Web” you mean “the concept of the ensemble of linked
interpreted documents to read shared by the medium of computer networks
and read on computers interfaces”, not the poor current implementation
of it, which is still using obsolete and despotic client–server model
(<http://thewebmustdie.com/>, <http://secushare.org/>).

> Yes, LaTeX does a lot to produce a beautifully typeset printout from
> an ASCII source. This is not enough; I want that same beautiful
> typesetting on screen, in browser, in any page width I happen to have,
> in my favorite typeface and font size, without having to recompile the
> document. And at the same time, it does too much. It has to maintain,
> and document authors have to utilize, a multitude of workarounds that
> are caused by TeX not using Unicode internally.

Having something technically and typographically good like LaTeX,
semantic and interpreted like HTML and language-neutral like
markdown/any-binary-interpreted-format would be great.