Yossi Kreinin <[email protected]> writes:
[...]
2. It is widely known that GNU loves `backtick-tick' quoting. This is
presumably better than "this" or 'this' because you can mechanically tell
an opening quote from a closing quote
Nope. It is because, for a long time, "'" was rendered as "’", so you got a
visually pleasing and apparently typographically correct layout.
[...]
Well, recently some of those people decided that it wasn't good enough
A while back the decision was made that abusing the single ASCII code-point
for two uses was bad, and it should be replaced with the actually
typographically correct usage, "'", which everyone then implemented.[1]
[...]
So they upgraded the GNU C compiler to print what I think is some UTF-8
quoting characters instead.
Well, it probably emits UTF-8 characters in a UTF-8 locale. Specifically, it
presumably now emits the desired, and typographically correct, "‘" and "’"
pairing, rather than abusing poor ASCII further.
Which looks like quotes on my terminal, but not necessarily in, say, GNU
emacs which assumes it gets ASCII and shows garbage around your undefined
identifiers and what-not.
Why, you just need to upgrade to Emacs 23 and this goes away, now they finally
have Unicode support. As long as you run in a UTF-8 locale, of course.
Make sure you don't have any other nice surprises from the upgrade, though.
Daniel
Footnotes:
[1] Certain non-Linux platforms may have been decades ahead on this.
--
X Windows is the Iran-Contra of graphical user interfaces: a tragedy of
political compromises, entangled alliances, marketing hype, and just plain
greed. X Windows is to memory as Ronald Reagan was to money.
-- The Unix Haters Handbook
