Re: [Monotone-devel] Re: Messages in monotone

[Zack Weinberg]

On 3/15/07, Ralf S. Engelschall <address@hidden> wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 15, 2007, Lapo Luchini wrote:
> > BTW: what about using `' instead of '', like gcc?
>
> Sorry, but unfortunately that's bad typography and GCC is still using
> this IMHO more or less because GCC is already a few decades old.

Recent GCC (4.0+ or maybe 4.1+) has grown machinery for inserting
quotation marks determined by the translation, or proper Unicode
quotation marks (U+2018 and U+2019 LEFT/RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK)
as a fallback, when it thinks the terminal supports them.  The
ultimate default is '' rather than `'.  It's very clever but I
hesitate to recommend it for Monotone, mainly because it's not always
possible to be sure that the terminal supports Unicode; there have
been a lot of complaints about people getting mojibake instead of the
quotation marks.  Also, we would have to write our own formatting
engine.  (Not that I would *object* to replacement of boost::format
... but it would be a lot of work for questionable gain.)

(And I think that making U+0060 a spacing grave accent instead of a
left single quote mark was the Wrong Thing, because a spacing grave
accent is basically useless, but a left single quote mark is very
useful.  But this is one of those things that there is no doing
anything about without a time machine.)

zw