Hi Jeff, you seem to be reading too much into various sources, but fortunately, it only tangentially affects what matters to the proposed patch: there can be little doubt that fonts more commonly show 0x60 as a grave accent today, and likely also in the past, and that that practice better matches most (in particular international) standards.
Jeff Conrad wrote on Fri, Feb 08, 2019 at 01:20:09PM +0000: > On Friday, February 8, 2019, Ingo Schwarze wrote >> Jeff Conrad wrote: >>> I think "historic" is pretty context dependent. As nearly as I can >>> tell, ASA/ANSI X3.4 has called for 0x60 to encode "accent grave". >> Absolutely not: >> >> http://worldpowersystems.com/ARCHIVE/codes/X3.4-1963/page5.JPG >> >> In that standard, 0x60 was still unassigned, and in the next version, >> the ambiguity is already stated. > I should have said "has long called for"; it looks to me like this was > largely resolved by 1967: > > http://worldpowersystems.com/ARCHIVE/codes/#ASCII-1967 First off, that's not authoritative but a random commentary by a random guy. Besides, neither the text nor the table captioned "ASCII diacritical marks" on the right hand side say that using 0x60 as an opening quote was deprecated; the table can hardly be interpreted that way because clearly the double quote was *not* redefined to mean a diaresis, and the comma was not redefined to mean a cedilla. > This is consistent with > > http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.96.678&rep=rep1&type=pdf > > (see Figure 70, p. 28). While the Fisher paper appears to be a respectable source, it is also not authoritative. Besides, i could find nothing in the surrounding text making any statement about the intended use of 0x60. The mere shape of the glyph in the table is obviously not saying anything. > It's also consistent with ANSI X3.4-1986: > > www.columbia.edu/kermit/ascii.html Again, not authoritative, but an interpretation by a random person. I failed to find the actual X3.4-1967 standard document online, but i see no reason to assume that it was different from later versions with respect to 0x60, and later versions allowed *both* usages of 0x60, as shown in one of my earlier mails. >> That's why i qualified "traditional fonts" with "that provide", >> implying that modern (i.e. Unicode-compatible) fonts always provide >> an "accent grave" at that code point. [...] > Perhaps it's better to just say that some implementations used 0x60 for > an opening quote, while others used it for accent grave - without trying > to assign a time frame. The ratio at any point in time would seem tough > to determine; I'm not sure what practical benefit would derive from > having a definitive answer anyway. > > The relevant question would seem what the ratio is today. I suspect > 0x60 is overwhelmingly shown as accent grave. Moreover, as Ingo > mentioned, the neutral single quotes are the proper match for neutral > double quotes. [...] That part is probably accurate. Showing 0x60 as a grave accent is clearly more common today and only that practice is compatible with Unicode. Jukka Korpela quotes a private communication from Eric Fisher http://jkorpela.fi/latin1/ascii-hist.html#60 indicating that showing 0x60 as a grave accent may have *always* been more common except possibly in the US. Yours, Ingo
