Re: origin of `notation'

[Xah Lee]

On Nov 14, 12:22 pm, "Buchs, Kevin" <buchs.ke...@mayo.edu> wrote:
> Ok, dumb question to which I have been unable to find the answer and which is 
> distracting me:
>
> In emacs documentation, what is the origin of using the accent grave 
> (backtick) to introduce a quoted phrase, often a command, while using an 
> apostrophe to terminate it.  Example: (info) Keys and Commands: 1st 
> paragraph: "binding" is quoted as such, but 2nd paragraph, `next-line' is 
> quoted that way. If someone who knows the answer will take the time to 
> answer, I promise I will document it on the Emacs wiki. Does this extend 
> beyond emacs? Beyond GNU & FSF?

it's a hack of 1970s to overcome the lack of proper matching quote
characters in ASCII.

It is also used by TeX, though i'm not sure we could say that TeX is
the first to adopt it. Back in 1970s, this hack is easy to conceive.

I'd be interested to know the real history of what programs first use
this convention, from those who are in the industry in the 1960s,
1970s, or 1980s.

For some detail on quotation symbols, and the GNU convention, see:

〈The Moronicities of Typography: Hyphen, Dash, Quotation Marks,
Apostrophe〉
http://xahlee.org/Periodic_dosage_dir/bangu/typography.html

See also:

〈Problems of Symbol Congestion in Computer Languages; ASCII Jam vs
Unicode〉
http://xahlee.org/comp/comp_lang_unicode.html

〈Computer Language Design: String Syntax〉
http://xahlee.org/comp/strings_syntax_in_lang.html

 Xah