GCC 's quoting typographic conventions

[Joseph S. Myers]

On Sun, 31 Oct 2004, Randy.Dunlap wrote:

> > To me, this is a very strong argument, given that the argument on the
> > other side is really nothing more than a relatively unimportant aesthetic
> > concern (and that aesthetic may well be overridden in practice by strange
> > results in environments that do not handle the extended character set).
> 
> Glad to hear that.  I'll second/third/whatever it.
> 
> Begin typographical is for some other tool.

Another tool can't do anything typographical without the necessary 
information.  With the matched quotes, however, it could e.g. place the 
contents of the quotes in a fixed-width font.

There is *nothing new* about non-ASCII quotes in messages: translated 
messages have had them for years.  GNU gettext was first released in 1995.  
GCC 3.0 started including translations.  Since then, tools parsing GCC 
error messages have had to be prepared to encounter non-ASCII texts or run 
GCC under LC_ALL=C.  We certainly don't guarantee the text of English 
messages to stay fixed rather than being freely improved either.  The only 
part of messages that is guaranteed is the initial "file:line:" or 
"file:line:column:" part defined by the GNU Coding Standards.  The English 
diagnostics should not be considered second class to those in other 
languages: all language diagnostics should be considered equals, and all 
equally free to be formatted as appropriate for the respective languages.

-- 
Joseph S. Myers               http://www.srcf.ucam.org/~jsm28/gcc/
    jsm@polyomino.org.uk (personal mail)
    joseph@codesourcery.com (CodeSourcery mail)
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