[vertaling] PSPP quote style

[John Darrington]

Hi Hendrik,

Thanks for input.  The short answer is that this is what all GNU software should do 
(and most does).  See http://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/html_node/Quote-Characters.html

You are right when you say that ` is annotated by iso-8859-1 as a grave accent.
However in GNU it is currently standardised as a left quote.  
The problem largely historical.  GNU predates both ISO-8859 and Unicode.
The original ascii specification did not stipulate the purpose of the glyphs, but says 

  "These characters should not be used in international interchange without 
   determining that there is agreement between sender and recipient."

So I suppose the agreement is that all recipients of GNU software who use the C locale
agree that ` means left quote.

This has been a hot topic on the GNU mailing lists in the past.  Like the coding
standards say, neither iso-8859-1 nor Unicode/UTF8 is ubiquitous.  When it is,
then the standard might change.  

J'

PS.  If I might be allowed to offer a personal perspective, one reason for prefering
ASCII, is that when I read your email, all your quote characters show up as ??? which
is annoying.



On Fri, Sep 17, 2010 at 12:16:46PM +0200, Hendrik Maryns wrote:
     Dear John and others,
     
     Is it really necessary to abuse the grave accent as a quote?  With
     Unicode, there are specific symbols for quotes: ??? and ??? or even ??? and ???,
     and for other languages also.
     
     Is there any specific reason why we have to use ASCII, apart from ???this
     is a code convention from the 80s????
     
     Cheers, H.
     
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