Re: origin of `notation'

[Barry Margolin]

In article <mailman.539.1321303262.798.help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org>,
 "Buchs, Kevin" <buchs.kevin@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?

The intent is to mimic normal typesetting, which uses different types of 
quotes to begin and end quotations.  The idea is that the quotes should 
be balanced, looking something like:

\       /
 binding

Modern character sets actually have these characters (some word 
processors will automatically put them in, calling this feature "smart 
quotes").  But Emacs's documentation is designed to work with 
traditional ASCII, so it instead uses these characters, which are the 
closest it has.

The unfortunate thing about this is that the characters don't actually 
look like mirror images of each other.  Backquote is slanted, but in 
most fonts apostrophe/single-quote is vertical.  So what you get is:

\       |
 binding

which looks stupid.  Maybe the original authors of the documentation 
were using a font with a slanted apostrophe, so they started this 
stylistic convention, and now we're stuck with it.

-- 
Barry Margolin, barmar@alum.mit.edu
Arlington, MA
*** PLEASE post questions in newsgroups, not directly to me ***