Re: [PATCH] standards: rewrite section on quoting

[Paul Eggert]

On 12/20/11 12:11, Paolo Bonzini wrote:
> single quotes are a good compromise.  In the program
> output, they look like the C locale alternative

But that's true regardless of whether one uses single
or double quotes.  Either way, the program's output
looks like the C locale alternative.

It's more consistent, for programs that use American spelling
and style, to use ASCII double quotes in the C locale, and
Unicode double-quotes in Unicode locales.

> the only GNU program that I know using Unicode quotes in an
> en_US.UTF-8 locale (i.e. without the @quot catalog) is GCC, and it
> uses single quotes.

GCC may use single quotes for many of its messages, but that
doesn't mean that all GNU programs should use that quoting style.
Many GNU programs use double-quotes in diagnostics.  In many
cases GCC uses double-quotes too.  For example:

  error: unterminated argument list invoking macro "FOO"

The GNU coding standards should not be suggesting that there's
anything wrong with this commonly-used quoting style.