From: Russ Allbery <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: 26 Oct 2000 17:05:05 -0700 > On a tangent, do we still want to use `...' quotes? See <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/quotes.html> for an extensive argument on this subject which convinced me, even though I'm really annoyed by it. It convinced me too, at first. But then I tried to convert GNU tar to use the more "standard" quotes. This turned into a real mess, and was the topic of extended controversy on the gnits mailing list. The consensus opinion, which I gradually came to share, was to leave well enough alone. So this week I spent an unhappy hour or two undoing the damage by reverting to the `traditional GNU quotes' in GNU tar. I assume that we're talking about US-ASCII English here. If we're talking about non-English US-ASCII text (like shell source code) then obviously one should use whatever US-ASCII character is appropriate. And if we are talking about Unicode/ISO10646/etc English, then it's clear that one should avoid the three characters `, ', and ", as none of those Unicode characters are used in ordinary English text. For some reason the whole subject reminds me of RS-232 connectors....
