I recently had cause to remind someone about the evilness of using backticks as quote marks, which lead me to dig up this really useful document: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/quotes.html
Please show this to anyone to who abuses backticks in this way and enlighten them!
Ooh, bikeshed! What about the possibility of ` and ‘ for texts in C, but with localizations to the correct left and right quotes for unicode locales?
Bikeshed?! It’s a matter of syntax!
@Andy, also you seem to have missed the point that ` is NOT a quote mark!
Yup, those weird `quote’ quoting are really annoying – good to know that I’m not alone with that opinion 🙂
The prime source of evilness seems to be that it looks `ugly’. Once you’re used to it, it’s not ugly at all.
LaTeX will happily display your undesired quotes in a desired way, and how the hell do I actually type unicode characters in Linux anyway? I never needed more than my compose key can handle… Actually, [compose], [‘], [‘] generates “´”, and after 5 minutes of trying I managed to find that [compose], [], [‘] generates “’”. Maybe I’ll start using them now 😉
Bugger, LaTeX actually does *not* support the use of the correct characters (will get hidden)…