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

[Andrew Suffield]

On Mon, Apr 26, 2004 at 08:54:43PM -0400, Michael Poole wrote:
> Matthieu Moy writes:
> 
> > Andrew Suffield <address@hidden> writes:
> >
> >> ` is a backtick, not a quote. Stop abusing it as a quote. That only
> >> works in tex, not C.
> >
> > We're talking  about user error messages. The  language doesn't matter
> > for that. Language  is something internal to your  tool that shouldn't
> > be shown to the user. 
> >
> > Wether you  write your software in  TeX[1], C, or  lisp mustn't change
> > the interface of your software. 
> 
> Indeed.  By similar logic, user error messages should not pointlessly
> conform to the standards of a language such as TeX when the user's
> language has a preferred quoting style (be it English, French or some
> other set).

It's not even that. In TeX, ` generates a real left quote in the
output, rather than a backtick (since left quotes are generally useful
in typography, and backticks are generally not). In everything else,
it's just a backtick. Frequent TeX users often have a bad habit of
abusing ` as a left quote everywhere else, presumably because they're
used to seeing it while editing TeX code.

> If you wish for a separate reference, the Unicode standard says that '
> is APOSTROPHE (but with U+2018 preferred for open quotation mark and
> U+2019 preferred as an apostrophe or closing quotation mark) and ` is
> GRAVE ACCENT (and not even the "similar characters" list mentions
> quoting characters).

("backtick" and "grave accent" are more or less synonymous; the latter
is the name in formal typography, I think, while the former is colloquial)

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