Re: address@hidden: Re: quotation characters]

[Paul Eggert]

address@hidden (Karl Berry) writes:

> Here are rms's comments on our draft about the quote character stuff.
>
> 1) I don't know how to address his problem with "domain at hand", please help?

How about changing this:

     Sticking to the ASCII character set (plain text, 7-bit characters) is
     preferred in GNU source code comments, text documents, and other
     contexts, unless there is good reason to do something else because of
     the domain at hand.

     If you need to use non-ASCII characters, for example to represent
     names of contributors, you should normally stick with one encoding, as
     one cannot in general mix encodings reliably.  

to this (changebars at left):

     Sticking to the ASCII character set (plain text, 7-bit characters) is
     preferred in GNU source code comments, text documents, and other
     contexts, unless there is good reason to do something else because of
  |  the application domain.  For example, if source code deals with
  |  the French Revolutionary calendar, it is OK if its literal strings
  |  contain accented characters in month names like ``Flor@'eal''.
  |  Also, it is OK to use non-ASCII characters to represent proper
  |  names of contributors in change logs.

  |  If you need to use non-ASCII characters, you should normally stick
  |  with one encoding, as
     one cannot in general mix encodings reliably.  

I chose the French Revolutionary calendar as the example partly
because emacs/lisp/calendar/cal-french.el is a precedent here.


> 2) I hope that if I point the "preferably", and that gcc is using
>    '...', and that the rest of the world thinks ' is the standard, he
>    will let the text pass.  Are there other arguments that might
>    persuade him?

I assume you mean "punt the 'preferably'"?  But you can remind him
that "quote" doesn't suffice for all applications.  In particular, it
isn't reentrant.  Implementations that can assume a garbage collector
(GCC is one example these days) should probably use something else,
e.g., quotearg.