Frank Heckenbach wrote: <snip>
E.g., when he writes. "Some US developers made use of the spacing grave accent (which they called "backquote") in the syntax of various command languages. The few instances where this happened are: [...]", he misses, above all, and probably apart from some cases not mentioned, its use as a left quote in GNU (and not only GNU) style messages such as `foobar'. I use this convention myself, and I don't think I'm a US developer. ;-) And considering that `...', treating ` as a left ("back") quote, is the only way to get something like paired quotes at all in plain ASCII, this still seems a reasonable choice.
This is appropriate as *input* in TeX, which converts it nicely, and may be appropriate as input in other source-code-like things, but the mismatched quotes look frankly hideous when *output* on any modern computer. Paired straight quotes look better.
I think the more interesting reference is: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/quotes.html
We are trying to fix this. I think it's a reported bug in texinfo that the generated info documents contain these bogus "quote" pairs. (The generated TeX documents, of course, contain nice curly quotes.)
<snip>
BTW, I'm saying "they" because he only writes about Windows and X11 platforms. Me, being a happy text mode user as much as possible, I'm not affected by those problems.
Well, it looks bad on my text mode console as well.... :-)
BTW, in case you're objecting to the fact that characters are used in a meaning different from their typographic intention in programming (and other formal) languages, that's nothing special with that particular character, of course. Even in Pascal we have things like `..' (standard Pascal), `=>' and `base#number' and `**' (EP), or `#number' (BP), e.g., even while other languages are much heavier in this regard.
You mean "..", "=>", "base#number", "**", or "#number", right? ;-)