Here are rms's comments on our draft about the quote character stuff. 1) I don't know how to address his problem with "domain at hand", please help?
2) I hope that if I point the "preferably", and that gcc is using '...', and that the rest of the world thinks ' is the standard, he will let the text pass. Are there other arguments that might persuade him? 3) I deleted the sentence. Draft appended. Thanks, k Date: Sun, 12 Jun 2005 15:57:57 -0400 From: Richard Stallman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Karl Berry) Subject: Re: quotation characters Sticking to the ASCII character set (plain text, 7-bit characters) is preferred in GNU source code comments, text documents, and other contexts, unless there is good reason to do something else because of the domain at hand. I am not sure what "the domain at hand" means. Please look for some other way to say whatever it is. In the C locale, GNU programs should stick to plain ASCII for quotation characters in messages to users: preferably 0x60 (`) for left quotes and 0x27 (') for right quotes. If using ` is unacceptable in your application, other possibilities are using ' for both opening and closing, or 0x22 (") for both opening and closing. It is ok, but not required, to use locale-specific quotes in other locales. The @uref{http://www.gnu.org/software/gnulib/, Gnulib} @code{quote} and @code{quotearg} modules provide a reasonably straightforward way to support locale-specific quote characters, as well as taking care of other issues, such as quoting a filename that itself contains a quote character. See the Gnulib documentation for usage details. I thought we were going to tell people to use `quote', not just mention it as a possibility. Latin1 does have paired standalone accents, but it seems wrong in principle to abuse them as quotes. We should not say this is a matter of principle. It is purely a practical matter. -- @node Character set @section Character set @cindex character set @cindex encodings @cindex ASCII characters @cindex non-ASCII characters Sticking to the ASCII character set (plain text, 7-bit characters) is preferred in GNU source code comments, text documents, and other contexts, unless there is good reason to do something else because of the domain at hand. If you need to use non-ASCII characters, for example to represent names of contributors, you should normally stick with one encoding, as one cannot in general mix encodings reliably. @node Quote characters @section Quote characters @cindex quote characters In the C locale, GNU programs should stick to plain ASCII for quotation characters in messages to users: preferably 0x60 (`) for left quotes and 0x27 (') for right quotes. If using ` is unacceptable in your application, other possibilities are using ' for both opening and closing, or 0x22 (") for both opening and closing. It is ok, but not required, to use locale-specific quotes in other locales. The @pxxref{http://www.gnu.org/software/gnulib/, Gnulib} @code{quote} and @code{quotearg} modules provide a reasonably straightforward way to support locale-specific quote characters, as well as taking care of other issues, such as quoting a filename that itself contains a quote character. See the Gnulib documentation for usage details. In any case, the documentation for your program should clearly specify how it does quoting, if different than the preferred method of ` and '. This is especially important if the output of your program is ever likely to be parsed by another program. Quotation characters are a difficult area in the computing world at this time: there are no true left or right quote characters in ASCII, or even Latin1; the ` character we use was standardized as a grave accent. However, Latin1 is still not universally usable. Unicode contains the unambiguous quote characters required, and its common encoding UTF-8 is upward compatible with [EMAIL PROTECTED] However, Unicode and UTF-8 are not universally well-supported, either. This may change over the next few years, and then we will revisit this. _______________________________________________ bug-gnulib mailing list bug-gnulib@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-gnulib