"Maiorana, Jason" wrote: > Why not let the word processor turn regular dashes and quotes into these > as needed, and not make more points of failure on the keyboard...
How about: Because not every piece of software into which I would like to enter English text is a word processor? Or: Because things get horribly complicated if the keyboard driver universally needs to be aware into which context (before or after a space, digit, etc.) I am going to insert this dash or quote? > My thinking was that they were strictly stylistic, and not something > you'd ever want in plain text. My thinking is that they are perfectly proper English characters on their own right and that the world of electronic publishing will become much nicer and simpler once we have them everywhere in plaintext and on keyboards. You shouldn't let the historic compromises made during the design of ASCII (when daisywheel and golfball printers were definining the state of the art) influence your views of what repertoire of characters is needed to encode English plain text. I'm also mildly looking forward to the use of non-ASCII charcaters in programming languages. HYPHEN can occur in symbol names (currently people use underscore as an ugly substitute, and got so used to the looks_of_it that they don't even recognize it as an ugly hack any more). MINUS separates variables in numeric expressions. Directional quotation marks would provide welcome new ways of delimiting and nesting e.g. string expressions. Markus -- Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK Email: mkuhn at acm.org, WWW: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/> -- Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/
