On 6 Jul 2008 02:14:15 GMT, (e-mail address removed)-berlin.de (Stefan Ram) wrote
in comp.lang.c++:
Just a question. Is there some reason that you can't use plain old
ordinary ASCII quotation marks like just about everyone else in this
group? Their universally understood meaning is to delimit quoted
material, after all.
It's not that universal: in French, you use « ... », and in
German, »...« is common. (Of course, since this is an English
language group, English conventions are to be preferred.)
Your affectation of using non-standard characters as
delimiters can make things difficult on some newsreaders, and
on the character sets used by some people.
Too much to ask that you use "and" instead of »and«?
I've often been tempted to use the French conventions when
quoting code... if the code already contains a "...". The
convention is obvious enough that it should be understandable,
and avoids the ambiguity of which " are part of the code, and
which are being used for quoting in the English text.
(Similarly, you run much less chance of an identifier clashing
with a keyword if the indentifiers are in French or German
.)
Until now, I've not done it, preferring ``...'', even though
that looks ugly on my screen, with my current font.
I'm not sure what the problem is with newsreaders: the standard
"citation" conventions of Usenet don't use quotes. The major
argument against it is, of course, the fact that there are
several widely used character encodings, and it's not the same
in them. But if the poster inserts the proper headers
specifying the encoding, it *should* work. (Whether it does or
not, is another question, and it's certain that sticking to
plain ASCII is a lot surer, at least in English language
groups.)