On Nov 02 12:09:45, [email protected] wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Werner LEMBERG wrote on Mon, Nov 02, 2020 at 09:42:35AM +0100:
>
> > To summarize: It seems that there is only a single platform left today
> > that by default uses a bitmap font for terminals with symmetric ` and
> > ' characters. This sort-of proves my point, doesn't it?
>
> I fear you missed the point. What matters is that large numbers
> of manual pages use unescaped ' and ` to represent plain ASCII '
> and ` for programming language syntax documentation - because that
> has been supported in manual pages for more than a decade, because
> authors have become used to it, and because it seems likely that
> before 2008, not many people ever considered mon-ASCII output of
> manual pages. So dropping support now gratuitiously breaks formatting
> of large numbers of manual pages in an important way, changing all
> existing pages would be a huge make-work project, and attempting
> to re-educate programmers is likely to alienate many of them.
>
> The shape of glyphs in some fonts has nothing to do with the issues
> involved.
>
> Admittedly, Jan could have chosen a less misleading example. From
> the context of his mail, it appeared that he intended `that' as
> "ASCII backtick quote apostophe-quote" (even though that is
> ungrammatical in most programming languages i'm aware of), not as
> "that in single quotes". An example like
>
> my_var=`sed 's/foo/bar/g' input.txt`
>
> would have been less confusing.
Yes, my example is misleading - but this was my point.
Thank you.
Jan
