Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Re: Re: [HEY TOM!] unhelpful error for unreadable directories

[Andrew Suffield]

On Mon, Apr 26, 2004 at 10:13:47PM +0200, Nikolai Weibull wrote:
> * Andrew Suffield <address@hidden> [Apr 26, 2004 20:50]:
> > > I don't want to ruin this now, but how about putting file and
> > > directory names within quotes, like `%s' as many other GNU utilities
> > > do?  It makes it easier, at least I find it to be true, to visually
> > > separate out the important information and also makes for prettier
> > > output overall.
> 
> > ` is a backtick, not a quote. Stop abusing it as a quote. That only
> > works in tex, not C.

> First of all, this is the quoting that most GNU utilities use.

And it's wrong. Carried over by people who had spent too much of the
day writing TeX, I think.

> Second, I know the semantic distinction in /bin/sh between ' and ` -
> that doesn't really apply here now does it?

Correct. The semantic distinction in English between ` and ' applies
here. ` is a backtick, and ' is a single quote.

[WARNING: 8x8 ASCII art follows. If you don't have a monospaced font
with square characters it won't look right.]

A backtick looks something like this:

*.......
.*......
..*.....
........
........
........
........
........

And a single quote looks something like this:

.....*..
.....*..
.....*..
........
........
........
........
........

But you might have an apostrophe instead:

....**..
.....*..
....*...
........
........
........
........
........

> Third, some fonts will display a single quote (') tilted slightly
> forward, which makes for a pretty display, terminating a previous
> backtick (`).

And some fonts will display a small picture of a horse. But most fonts
give you a backtick for ` and a single quote or apostrophe for ',
which are horribly mismatched and look awful. Notably any vaguely
modern font will do this, because it will have been written for the
unicode character set and therefore contains real matched quotes at
different codepoints.

-- 
  .''`.  ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield
 : :' :  http://www.debian.org/ |
 `. `'                          |
   `-             -><-          |

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