[bug #34530] make (ab)uses the ASCII grave accent (0x60) as a left single quotation mark

[Dan Kegel]

URL:
  <http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?34530>

                 Summary: make (ab)uses the ASCII grave accent (0x60) as a
left single quotation mark
                 Project: make
            Submitted by: dankegel
            Submitted on: Tue 11 Oct 2011 04:58:03 PM GMT
                Severity: 3 - Normal
              Item Group: Enhancement
                  Status: None
                 Privacy: Public
             Assigned to: None
             Open/Closed: Open
         Discussion Lock: Any
       Component Version: 3.82
        Operating System: None
           Fixed Release: None
           Triage Status: None

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Details:

As Markus wrote in 
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-make/2004-10/msg00013.html
gnu make uses funny quotes in error messages.  
This behavior persists in Make 3.82.

Here's his original message:

$ make --version GNU Make 3.80
$ make love
make: *** No rule to make target `love'.  Stop.
                                 ^

The use of ASCII character 0x60 as a left single quotation mark is deprecated
and looks today rather ugly with most contemporary fonts.

Suggested behavior (in the C and POSIX locales, i.e. without translation):

$ make love
make: *** No rule to make target 'love'.  Stop.
                                 ^
In other locales, such as en_*.UTF-8, the straight single quotation mark
(U+0027) can easily be translated via gettext() with the typographically
nicer ones (U+2018 and U+2019) available in UTF-8 and some other
encodings.

Suggested fix:

 a) s/`/'/g
 b) use Unicode quotation marks in the translations for
    en_GB.UTF-8 and en_US.UTF-8

Detailed background information:

  http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/quotes.html





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