Re: [PATCH] Fix incompatible quote handling

[Andi Kleen <ak at suse dot de>]

On Sat, Oct 30, 2004 at 11:40:45AM -0400, Andrew Pinski wrote:
> 
> On Oct 30, 2004, at 11:31 AM, Andi Kleen wrote:
> 
> >
> >This patch fixes the quote misfeature for me to PR18229. It just
> >uses normal ASCII quotes that always work on all terminals.
> >Resulting code is shorter too and should work in all environments
> >unlike the old code.
> 
> Please read the history around this code and why it was added for
> 4.0.0.  Again this is not a misfeature instead a very improvement in
> the way diagnostic is outputted.  Now if it was the old days before
> ? and ? I would say why are we not using them and find out that
> character encodings are different for different OS.  But this
> is not the case any more with UTF.
> 
> http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc-patches/2004-05/msg01537.html patch which
> added this code.
> 
> In fact this quote from that patch should give you an idea:
> (Note that you won't get the Unicode quotes for English until the
> configure patch in
> <http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc-patches/2004-05/msg01414.html> has gone in.
> I have however tested that replacing the conditionals in intl.c by #if
> 1 does get the Unicode quotes for LC_CTYPE=en_GB.UTF-8.)

There is not any reasoning in that mail why the incompatible quotes should
be better.  I can see the point of translated quotes in other languages, 
but using UTF-8 quotes in English is unnecessary and causes problems in
common setups (old xterm sshing into modern linux) 
It also violates the reasonable assumption that a console application like 
gcc should not make unnecessary requirements to the terminal.

-Andi