11–20 of 195 posts
It's very odd for me to see the grave accent (`) as quoting mark in bash and other programming languages. I understand that the accent alone lose its function for the human language. But still uncomfortable to se an accent as delimiter to a string.
Edit: I forgot HTAB was actually part of ASCII. Oh well!
Tell that to GCC:
/usr/lib/gcc/i686-linux-gnu/4.6/../../../i386-linux-gnu/crt1.o: In function `_start':
(.text+0x18): undefined reference to `main'
> Where ``quoting like this'' comes from
I did it for a while out of a habit acquired from working with TeX. In TeX, it is the source code syntax for encoding quotes. Of course, it is lexically analyzed and converted to proper typesetting.
> If you can use only ASCII’s typewriter characters, then use the apostrophe character (0x27) as both the left and right quotation mark (as in 'quote').
It looks like shit in any font in which the apostrophe is a little nine, which is historically correct. What you want is a little "six" on one side and a "nine" on the other, or at least some approximation thereof. Even if the apostrophe is crappily rendered as a little vertical notch, it still pairs with a backwards-slanted `.
(The representation of apostrophe as a little vertical notch, I suspect, caters to literals in programming languages.)
> If you can use Unicode characters ...
then you should still stick to ASCII unless you have other good reasons to. ``Can'' is not the same thing as ``should'', let alone ``must''.
> For example, 0x60 and 0x27 look under Windows NT 4.0 with the TrueType font Lucida Console (size 14) like this:
The idea that people should change their behavior because of which font is default on the Windows cmd.exe console is laughable.
It's very odd for me to see the grave accent (`) as quoting mark in bash and other programming languages. I understand that the accent alone lose its function for the human language. But still uncomfortable to se an accent as delimiter to a string.
I'm not even sure why ASCII has a grave accent. There are no combining marks so you could never write it over another letter. Edit: I forgot HTAB was actually part of ASCII. Oh well!
* The unaccented letter
* The backspace character
* The accent character
If this makes no sense to you, try to imagine a literal, physical typewriter. Windows line terminators also work with a similar principle.
It's very odd for me to see the grave accent (`) as quoting mark in bash and other programming languages. I understand that the accent alone lose its function for the human language. But still uncomfortable to se an accent as delimiter to a string.
I'm not even sure why ASCII has a grave accent. There are no combining marks so you could never write it over another letter. Edit: I forgot HTAB was actually part of ASCII. Oh well!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not even sure why ASCII has a grave accent. There are no combining marks so you could never write it over another letter. Edit: I forgot HTAB was actually part of ASCII. Oh well!
On a teletype, ALL characters are combining marks because you can backspace (another ASCII character derived directly from teletype codes) and type another character overtop it.
I'm pretty sure text like: ``quoted'' Is how you're supposed to write short quotes in the TeX/LaTeX typesetting system. [edit: My point being that the author seems to think this type of quoting originated with X11... which is actually newer than TeX (X11 was first released in 1984), and that the prevalence of this type of quoting likely originated with TeX when it was released in 1978... which isn't mentioned at all…
It just occurred to me how much easier certain text-operations (like syntax highlighting, regular expressions and other parsers) if we consistently used the right unicode symbols for quotes and apostrophes
Hey, imagine being able to nest strings without escaping! What a concept!
I would fain use the curly quotes if only Darwin's groff(1) wouldn't barf on them. For the time being, man pages for one still need to quote like ``this''.
It just occurred to me how much easier certain text-operations (like syntax highlighting, regular expressions and other parsers) if we consistently used the right unicode symbols for quotes and apostrophes
The only languages I know off the top of my head that use balanced delimiters for strings are M4 and Perl 6. Hey, imagine being able to nest strings without escaping! What a concept!
> For the constructs except here-docs, single characters are used as starting and ending delimiters. If the starting delimiter is an opening punctuation (that is (, [, {, or ). If the starting delimiter is an unpaired character like / or a closing punctuation, the ending delimiter is the same as the starting delimiter. Therefore a / terminates a qq// construct, while a ] terminates both qq[] and qq]] constructs.
> Please do not use the ASCII grave accent (0x60) as a left quotation mark together with the ASCII apostrophe (0x27) as the corresponding right quotation mark (as in `quote'). Tell that to GCC: /usr/lib/gcc/i686-linux-gnu/4.6/../../../i386-linux-gnu/crt1.o: In function `_start': (.text+0x18): undefined reference to `main' Looks good to me, by the way. > Where ``quoting like this'' comes from I did it for a while out…
Why? Using non-ASCII Unicode characters acts like a nice canary for detecting character encoding issues. Besides, why would I purposely limit my text to ASCII? It doesn't even suffice for English, let alone almost any other language I use — including my native language Dutch, German, and Japanese.