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Re: [PATCH 0/4] quotearg improvements


From: Bruno Haible
Subject: Re: [PATCH 0/4] quotearg improvements
Date: Tue, 20 Dec 2011 01:22:36 +0100
User-agent: KMail/1.13.6 (Linux/2.6.37.6-0.5-desktop; KDE/4.6.0; x86_64; ; )

Hi Karl,

>     In non-Unicode locales, the left-pointing
>     grave accent is replaced by the closing quote.  
> 
> I am very fond of my ` characters and hate the fact that stupid
> standards broke what was the obviously useful thing to do ...

I don't know what you consider to be the "obviously useful thing".
I find Markus Kuhn's write-ups at
  http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/apostrophe.html
  http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/quotes.html
very convincing.

>     If the patch is accepted, I'll follow-up patching standards.texi.
> 
> Shouldn't acceptance of the standards.texi change (by rms) come first?

In general, you probably don't want to put into standards.texi rules that
have never been experimented, and never been tried on real users?
So, if the standards are to evolve in some way, you have to allow some
leeway for experimentation.

Now, in this particular case, GCC has been doing the experiment:

$ LC_ALL=C gcc --help
  ...
  -x <language>            Specify the language of the following input files
                           Permissible languages include: c c++ assembler none
                           'none' means revert to the default behavior of
                           guessing the language based on the file's extension
  ...
$ LC_ALL=C gcc -x foo
gcc: warning: '-x foo' after last input file has no effect
gcc: fatal error: no input files
compilation terminated.

If Paolo wants to give a wider audience to the experiment, why not?

Bruno



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