Re: makeinfo should quote 'like this' instead of `like this'

[Karl Berry]

Hi John,

    Why?

Because rms accepted the proposal of Bruno/Paul/Jim/et al. to make the
GNU coding standards recommend '...' over `...'.

    I didn't see that argument.  Where was it?

bug-gnulib, but I didn't offer any real arguments.  Being a TeX person,
I just hate the undirected quotes and I get so tired of being told that
` = grave is "the standard" that I don't want to talk about it any more.

    I see no convincing reason to change.  

The reason they advanced is that essentially all current fonts render `
as a grave accent.  (This choice by the font people is the original sin,
IMHO.)  Therefore `...' looks weird to anyone who hasn't hacked their
fonts (as I have :).

    the agreement in GNU has always been that 0x60 means opening single quote.

As far as I followed things, their argument is that nowadays no one
except GNU (and TeX) uses ` to mean left quote, so we should join the
world.  I confess that I find some validity in that.

As far as I can tell, they aren't persuadable, and I doubt rms will
change his decision now, but feel free to write any of the above if you
like.

karl