>>21
Raises a good question. Do any parsers, interpreters, or compilers recognise ` (grave accent, $60 in ASCII) as a quote? I mean, with dumb programs, it might be easier to layer your quotes using what I am calling ASCII proper.
A smart program would know to keep a counter and to layer quotes appropriately, but who’s to say the people who came up ASCII proper had smart parsers, interpreters, or compilers? They might have relied on using the grave to indicate a start, and a single quote to indicate an end. From there, it could just seep into their writing styles using double graves and double quotes.
(All conjecture on my part, though.)