Martin D Kealey <mar...@kurahaupo.gen.nz> writes: > I note that much of the documentation still uses a quoting style that > pretends that characters U+0060 and U+0027 are matching opening and closing > quotes, and that new documentation is still being added that follows this > style. For extra credit, they're sometimes redoubled as `` and '' to be > fake double quotes. > > The use of the grave accent symbol as if it were a quote mark is visually > asymmetric (ugly!), has semantic conflicts (including with its use as a > shell metacharacter), is in the wrong character class (for line wrapping > and hyphenation), disregards all formal specifications (Unicode-16.0.0 > (2024) still says "grave accent"), and is extremely outdated (ASA > X3.4-1963 said > "diacritic" 62 years ago). A more thorough analysis is provided by Markus > Kuhn <https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/quotes.html>. > > GNU is the last serious hold-out, and "this is how we've always done it" > won't wash any more.
It is, in fact, not the last serious hold-out at all: https://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/standards.html#Quote-Characters. I don't recall when it changed other than it being in the last few years.
