Date: Mon, 25 Aug 2025 09:27:51 -0700
From: Paul Eggert <[email protected]>
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
| For the second issue, which is what I think youâre focusing on,
Yes, of course, which is why I said:
regardless of questions of how nice it is to type
| there has been considerable confusion and some controversy due to the
| historical use of ' (U+0027 APOSTROPHE) to mean many things including
| apostrophe and single quotation marks.
Yes, and people are ignorant. ASCII at least had an excuse, there were
only 128 code points (including control chars) available - not every possible
glyph could be represented, not even close. At least they didn't copy
(some) ancient typewriters (which might have been tempting when ASCII was
being invented) and also omit 0 and 1, using O and l instead.
Unicode has no such excuse.
| On this topic the current Unicode Standard says the following[1]:
| The semantics of U+2019 are therefore context dependent.
That's simply pathetic, there is no excuse for that. If they considered
U+0027 too encumbered with confusion to recommend using, they could have
easily just added a new code point that is uniquely apostrophe.
Apostrophe and closing single quote are about as related as 1 and l (or 0/O).
They have a (kind of) similar appearance, but otherwise are completely
different things.
| For example, if surrounded by letters or digits on both sides,
And 'twas the night before Christmas when the dogs' fleas' bites were ....
| Given the Unicodeâs limitations no approach to this problem is perfect.
Unicode has both U+0027 and U+2019 - there's no reason at all not to
use both, using each when that one is required. Particularly for
usages like this when no-one is going to be attempting to parse the
results (nothing will be wondering whether U+0027 might have just been
an ASCII single quote (opening or closing) and trying to guess what to
do, where all that matters is what its appearance ends up being.
kre
