Re: Upcoming loss of usability of Emacs source files and Emacs.

[Nikolai Weibull]

On Tue, Jun 23, 2015 at 4:03 PM, Dmitry Gutov <address@hidden> wrote:
> On 06/23/2015 04:02 PM, Nikolai Weibull wrote:
>
>> It’s probably not worth noting, but that can’t possible be true.  Is
>> someone who sees ‘‘’ going to wonder what that symbol means, whereas
>> if they see ‘'’ they’ll go “aha!”?
>
> Not confused, but probably a bit weirded out. Pretty much what Oleh said.

Reading a German text where they „quote like this“ looks really weird
to an American or a Swede as well.  But we’re not even talking about
differing quotation styles.  We’re talking about the same symbols
(modulo the different code points), just rendered either as a nice
piece of wrapping around the quoted text, or as four fencepost that
keep the quoted text from walking on the lawn.

>> Given that almost all professionally printed literature
>> uses real quotation marks, I’d assume that those who are learning
>> English will also be given the benefit of them (where native English
>> readers will have seen them in books since they were little).

> Speaking of printed literature, I've just opened a random O'Reilly's book.
> While curly double-quotes appear a lot, the closest thing to single quotes
> were apostrophes (which look the same, but serve a different purpose).

That’s because the book was written in American English, not English
English.  In American English, single quotes are used when quotes are
nested.  It’s (generally) the other way around in English English.
Regarding apostrophes, they /are/ the same, even though they server
different purposes.