Re: Quotes

[Michael Piotrowski]

Jeff Kingston <address@hidden> writes:

> On Thu, 20 Sep 2001 15:14:38 +0200, Michael Piotrowski wrote:
>   > After annoying you with questions about sentence ends in various
>   > languages, here is one about quotation marks.
>   > 
>   > I'm currently using a function like this to automatically produce
>   > appropriate quotation marks:
>   > 
>   >    def @Quote right x address@hidden @Case {
>   >                                     {de German} @Yield ,,x``
>   >                                     {fr French} @Yield «~x~»
>   >                                            else @Yield ``x''}}
>   > 
>   > Now I thought I could add some more languages; if there's interest, I
>   > could also create patches for standard.ld and dsf....
>
> I'm a bit puzzled by this.  What use is it?  Why not just write the
> quotation characters themselves?

It's useful when automatically generating Lout input from sources that
don't contain the quotation marks; you can always output @Quote{...} 
and the quotes will come out right.

Of course one could put this knowledge somewhere else, but you've got
to have this knowledge *somewhere* in your system.  And since Lout is
already quite smart about language I think it wouldn't be a bad place
to put it.  After all, it's not much different from knowing what to
call a figure or a table of contents, isn't it?

-- 
Michael Piotrowski, M.A.                                  <address@hidden>