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Re: quote marks [was: Status of i18n patches]
Paul Koning wrote:
Quotes are language-dependent. 201c/201d may be right for English,
but not for Dutch (which uses ,, for open quote) nor French (which
quotes with << and >>), to mention just a few examples.
-which may be an argument for single-quotes, rather than double-quotes.
Actually, I think you're point may not be very relevant, since we're
not talking about natural language quotation, but about whatever
looks natural *to a programmer* when indicating names, not when
quoting phrases. For example, underlining might actually be a
reasonable output format. Or even better: Have the phrases that
are subject to translation appear in a variable-width font, but
the names in the messages appear in a fixed-width font, like they
would in a technical article.
Perhaps we should keep `%s' in the error messages, but encourage
user interfaces (such as IDEs) to use fonts instead. Using `%s'
makes that fairly easy.
--
--Per Bothner
per@bothner.com http://www.bothner.com/per/