On Thursday, May 29, 2003, at 02:16 pm, Pim Blokland wrote:
Ben Dougall schreef:
the reason i said that bit is html and xml (i know they're nothumanlanguages and they're certainly not in the area i'm asking about)
So you were not talking about computer languages and I don't need to point out Pascal's (* *) and C's /* */ delimiters for comments?
not what i had in mind, but worth noting. thanks.
OK...
i wondering is there any language that uses of more than one glyph for an open or close, like in xml and html? they have a group of characters that together mean open or close
I seem to recall it was perfectly normal for typesetters to use two single quotes instead of one double quote.
yup, that's a good point. people could easily use that in usual text. '' or ‘‘ or ’’ would be an occurrence of two glyphs being used to symbolise a open or close in english. so the chances of it in other language - quite high i think.
So citations would be entered ''like this'' instead of "like this". That's two characters each. And there is of course the colloquial habit of speaking the words quote and unquote to delimit a citation. These words making up 5 and 7 characters, respectively.
yes, and that could happen in any language, i think.
great information - just the sort of thing i'm after. thanks.
