left-quote ( ` ) on International keyboards [Prothon]

[Mark Hahn]

Can users with international keyboards tell me if they have problems typing
the left-quote ( ` ) character? It isn't used much in Python but we are
thinking of giving it a slightly more important role in Prothon. (I'm not
going to say what that role is here to avoid starting another 300 message
thread like I did last time If you are curious you can go to the
Prothon mailing lists at http://prothon.org).

 

[Chris Liechti]

Can users with international keyboards tell me if they have problems
typing the left-quote ( ` ) character? It isn't used much in Python
but we are thinking of giving it a slightly more important role in
Prothon. (I'm not going to say what that role is here to avoid
starting another 300 message thread like I did last time If you
are curious you can go to the Prothon mailing lists at
http://prothon.org).

i can type it as combined character,
but i'd recomend against it. ' and ` are hard to distinguish for people
with not so good sight. and the meaning/effect isnt obvious anyway.

 

[Tor Iver Wilhelmsen]

Can users with international keyboards tell me if they have problems typing
the left-quote ( ` ) character?

For keyboards using the "combining" key in the place for = and + on US
keyboards, it's one more key to type (the key plus space). Not a big
deal, we get used to it.

 

[Christophe Cavalaria]

Can users with international keyboards tell me if they have problems
typing
the left-quote ( ` ) character? It isn't used much in Python but we are
thinking of giving it a slightly more important role in Prothon. (I'm not
going to say what that role is here to avoid starting another 300 message
thread like I did last time If you are curious you can go to the
Prothon mailing lists at http://prothon.org).

For French keyboards, it's "Right ALT + 7" sometimes followed by a space
( yeah, sometimes it's a deadkey like ^ and " are )

 

[Mark Hahn]

For French keyboards, it's "Right ALT + 7" sometimes followed by a
space ( yeah, sometimes it's a deadkey like ^ and " are )

What does deadkey mean?

 

[Tuure Laurinolli]

What does deadkey mean?

The same as 'combined key' above. It doesn't immediately produce output,
instead you can press some other key after it, ` + a = à, and you can
produce the literal with ` + space.

Anyway, it really is a bit hard to discern from ' or ´, even though it
would otherwise be a great character to be used as an operator in
programming languages

On the standard Finnish layout there is one key with three dead meanings
on it, which can be alternated with shift and altgr - a truly wonderful
piece of engineering that leads to 4 key combinations producing
characters such as Â

 

[Mark Hahn]

The same as 'combined key' above. It doesn't immediately produce
output, instead you can press some other key after it, ` + a = à, and
you can produce the literal with ` + space.

Thanks. I can see where the name comes from.

I never thought of it being used as an accent mark. I always thought of it
as a crummy left-quote. That explains why it is always drawn so high.

We are thinking of using it as a marker for "symbols" in Prothon. They are
like strings but can only be legal variable labels: `var, `init_, `x,
`account_balance, etc. I think in our application they look good and won't
be mistaken for quotes since they don't come in pairs. They are readable
and distinquishable in this context. Also, symbols won't be used that
frequently so typing won't be too much of a pain.

 

[Timo Virkkala]

We are thinking of using it as a marker for "symbols" in Prothon. They are
like strings but can only be legal variable labels: `var, `init_, `x,
`account_balance, etc. I think in our application they look good and won't
be mistaken for quotes since they don't come in pairs. They are readable
and distinquishable in this context. Also, symbols won't be used that
frequently so typing won't be too much of a pain.

Why not use something like $ or something? I'm not familiar with Prothon, so
I don't know if $ is already used for something, but it's a character
normally used with symbols/placeholders/etc.

 

[Michael Piotrowski]

I never thought of it being used as an accent mark. I always thought of it
as a crummy left-quote. That explains why it is always drawn so high.

You may want to have a look at

<http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/quotes.html>

for details. Personally, I don't think it was a good idea to define
character 0x60 as GRAVE ACCENT, but that's what we have ...

 

[Mark Hahn]

Why not use something like $ or something? I'm not familiar with
Prothon, so I don't know if $ is already used for something, but it's
a character normally used with symbols/placeholders/etc.

We aren't using any of the oddball symbols any more, so $ is free. I'm a
little wary of proposing using it though. The last time I proposed using $
Prothon was accused of being Perl

I'll put it up for vote on the Prothon mailing list. You can come by and
vote for it

Is $ easier to type on foreign keyboards?

 

[Miki Tebeka]

Hello Mark,

Can users with international keyboards tell me if they have problems typing
the left-quote ( ` ) character?

No problem with Hebrew.

Bye.

 

[Norbert Klamann]

Thanks. I can see where the name comes from.

I never thought of it being used as an accent mark. I always thought of it
as a crummy left-quote. That explains why it is always drawn so high.

We are thinking of using it as a marker for "symbols" in Prothon. They are
like strings but can only be legal variable labels: `var, `init_, `x,
`account_balance, etc. I think in our application they look good and won't
be mistaken for quotes since they don't come in pairs. They are readable
and distinquishable in this context. Also, symbols won't be used that
frequently so typing won't be too much of a pain.

Be aware of the dangers of bad typesetting ! I once had a hard time to
figure out unix commands where the ` was set as a ' in a commercial
book about unix!

All the best !
Norbert

 

[Tuure Laurinolli]

We aren't using any of the oddball symbols any more, so $ is free. I'm a
little wary of proposing using it though. The last time I proposed using $
Prothon was accused of being Perl

I already said I dislike $ the las time i was tried to be used. The
reason for me is that $ looks just like any other letter whereas ` is
immediately recognizable as a special character.

THe other person who shared my opinion had much better argumentation
than my "it looks wrong", but basically it came down to the same thing.
Just with words such as "baseline" and "sigil":

Is $ easier to type on foreign keyboards?

I doubt that, probably almost every special character on non-US
keyboards requires two sequential keypresses or a combination. ` is `
followed by space, $ is altgr + 4. Personally I think ` is actually
easier ty type.

 

[Christophe Cavalaria]

We aren't using any of the oddball symbols any more, so $ is free. I'm a
little wary of proposing using it though. The last time I proposed using
$ Prothon was accused of being Perl

I'll put it up for vote on the Prothon mailing list. You can come by and
vote for it

Is $ easier to type on foreign keyboards?

$ is one of the only thing easy to type in a french keyboard. Thanks god
that we don't need to type too many {} in Python for they are the worst

Of course, I can't speak for other keyboard layouts.

 

[Timo Virkkala]

Is $ easier to type on foreign keyboards?

Well.. It's AltGr+4 on the Finnish keyboard, so not too hard. Easier than
{[]}\, since they are AltGr+7890+ and you can really do them with one hand,
whereas @£$ can be done with two hands.

 

[Timo Virkkala]

Is $ easier to type on foreign keyboards?

Well.. It's AltGr+4 on the Finnish keyboard, so not too hard. Easier
than {[]}\, since they are AltGr+7890+ and you can really do them with
one hand, whereas @£$ can be done with two hands.

.... reading that sentence and realizing that it's a bit strange:

It's not really the fact that it's one/two-handed, but with AltGr, I have to
twist my right hand to a strange angle with the one-handed chars. The
two-handed ones are faster to type.

 

[Konstantin Veretennicov]

Can users with international keyboards tell me if they have problems typing
the left-quote ( ` ) character? It isn't used much in Python but we are

Single keystroke for me (Cyrillic/Russian).

-kv