Re: ASCII-only startup message?

[Per Starbäck]

>> And yes, there are some people who think that the squiggle used as
>> apostrophe and as right-single-quotation should be seen as two
>> different characters depending on usage.
>
> The basic argument is this: an apostrophe is not a quotation
> mark; their purposes/uses are different. [...]

You say that you are not trying to reform Unicode, so let's not go
over the arguments for
reforming it again and who has suggested that on what mailing lists.
Let's stick to what Unicode actually says. It is not unclear, and
"right single quote" and "punctuation apostrophe" are never seen as
different characters there. It is one character.

What Unicode character should be used for that character? That
depends. Unicode says "When text is set, U+2019 right single quotation
mark is preferred as apostrophe". But we are not setting text. Should
we stick to the overloaded ascii characters instead? There are
arguments for that (you mention some, like "easier to use"). There has
already been lots of discussion about this, and a decision has been
made to use the typographical characters in some places.

> No one suggested otherwise.  The question raised was whether
> a right curly quote mark should be used in *scratch* as
> apostrophe.

I don't see how "... as apostrophe" is important here, since it is the
same character.
Then the question is just "Should curly quote marks be used there?" I
can see arguments for or against that, and am not entering that
discussion. I just want to make sure Emacs doesn't create its own
division between apostrophes and right single quotes and displays
texts where those look different.