Re: backquote quote pair notation: What does it mean in Emacs document?

[Thien-Thi Nguyen]

() Jambunathan K <kjambunathan@gmail.com>
() Tue, 18 Dec 2012 17:19:06 +0530

   It helps with speed-reading.

Additionally, it distinguishes names used in code from common words.
E.g.: The point of `point' is to "point between" characters.

Collectively, this markup is called "quoting".  There are many styles.
The particular pair ` (U+60) and ' (U+27) originated w/ ASCII, which was
practically all that was available when Emacs and, to a lesser extent,
the Info system, were initially written.

These days, i personally prefer ‘ (U+2018) and ’ (U+2019) [1], which is
symptomatic of the problem (there are many styles); other people prefer
differently, and every so often debate arises on which style is best
going forward.

And that's only talking about technical documents.  In literature, you
can find even more styles.  For example, quoting is often used in a
novel to delimit the words spoken (or thought) by the characters.
Recently i read a book where this was done not by surrounding that text
with such pairs, but by inserting a long hyphen (em-dash) between spoken
text and other text.

Anyway, <http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/TypographicalPunctuationMarks>
and Emacswiki, in gneneral, have more info.


[1] http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/gnu-emacs-sources/2010-04/msg00010.html

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