Re: Odd typo in update message?

[Thomas Maier]

On Wed, 2005-03-16 at 12:10 -0500, Larry Jones wrote:
> Thomas Maier writes:
> > 
> > Well-establishing this way of quoting was probably the Wrong Thing to
> > do;
> 
> No, it was not.

But obviously it has become so, like I said by the way.  At least with
most modern fonts I have seen.

> Markus Kuhn either doesn't know or chooses to ignore
> that this convention long predates things like the X Window System and
> its fronts, going all the way back to the original ASCII standard (1968)
> if not before.  No matter how much Unicode proponents wish for all other
> coded character sets and typographic conventions to go away, that is
> *not* going to happen any time soon.  Using the convention was not an
> inadvertent mistake, it was a deliberate decision.

Whatever it was in the past, and I know it has worked and i have used it
myself in the past, right now, in the present, it just looks ugly.  I do
not want to add fuel to some Unicode vs. ASCII war, I do not want to say
that people in the past were stupid, I am just sitting in front of a
machine from the present with lots of software and especially fonts from
the present.  I would not even have suggested touching it because it
might break other software relying on cvs output, but you said you
"believe Derek has made a concerted effort recently to use them more
consistently" and I'd say if touching this stuff at all, you could make
it just look better on today's systems.  But of course we can leave it
all like it was in ye good olde days.  After all, we are on Unix.

Thomas

P.S.: Yes, I use Unix (although it is the wimpy Linux flavour) and I
(mostly) happily use cvs.  Which, of course, kind of contradicts my
statement regarding modern software :>.

-- 
Thomas Maier - Research Assistant - University of Kassel, Germany