Whence did these ``faggot quotes'' came? What is the origin of these seemingly homoerotic typographic characters. And who continues to perpetuate their use? Is their a darker conspiracy behind their rise to center stage--are they used to subliminally delimit occult directives in some sort of ``MK- Ultra''-esque mind reprogramming campaign? It seems like everyone in /prague/ is using them now, lest they be ridiculed and mistaken for a foreigner to this board. I for one am somewhat taken aback by this ardent faggotry and I demand an immediate explanation.
>>1 http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book-Z-H-3.html ``I think that it's extraordinarily important that we in computer science keep fun in computing. When it started out, it was an awful lot of fun. Of course, the paying customers got shafted every now and then, and after a while we began to take their complaints seriously. We began to feel as if we really were responsible for the successful, error-free perfect use of these machines. I don't think we are. I think we're responsible for stretching them, setting them off in new directions, and keeping fun in the house. I hope the field of computer science never loses its sense of fun. Above all, I hope we don't become missionaries. Don't feel as if you're Bible salesmen. The world has too many of those already. What you know about computing other people will learn. Don't feel as if the key to successful computing is only in your hands. What's in your hands, I think and hope, is intelligence: the ability to see the machine as more than when you were first led up to it, that you can make it more.''
In the C locale, GNU programs should stick to plain ASCII for quotation characters in messages to users: preferably 0x60 (‘`’) for left quotes and 0x27 (‘'’) for right quotes. It is ok, but not required, to use locale-specific quotes in other locales.
The Gnulib quote and quotearg modules provide a reasonably straightforward way to support locale-specific quote characters, as well as taking care of other issues, such as quoting a filename that itself contains a quote character. See the Gnulib documentation for usage details.
In any case, the documentation for your program should clearly specify how it does quoting, if different than the preferred method of ‘`’ and ‘'’. This is especially important if the output of your program is ever likely to be parsed by another program.
Quotation characters are a difficult area in the computing world at this time: there are no true left or right quote characters in Latin1; the ‘`’ character we use was standardized there as a grave accent. Moreover, Latin1 is still not universally usable.
Unicode contains the unambiguous quote characters required, and its common encoding UTF-8 is upward compatible with Latin1. However, Unicode and UTF-8 are not universally well-supported, either.
This may change over the next few years, and then we will revisit this.