On 20-1-2010 8:28, Alan BRASLAU wrote:
On Wednesday 20 January 2010 08:04:43 Taco Hoekwater wrote:
The problem is that all the latex and plain tex books promote the use of `` and '' and people that already use TeX are unlikely to change their habits (and most will not read the context manual as thoroughly as they should).
This is my concern. Whereas I do prefer \quotation{} being functionally logical, after all the spirit of TeX, I also like unicode generalizations (such as ± for \pm). Nevertheless, hard core TeX users as well as converts from LaTeX *expect* ``'', --, ---, ..., etc. to work in ConTeXt. I assume that the present discussion is useful and not simply controversial.
one can always write small script that converts `` '' to \quotation (actually one of my reasons for never using `` '' is that it looks quite ugly in the source as the second pair is not tilted and i hate ugly looking sources)
I ignore the mechanisms behind the different implementations (macro, fonts, catcar, ...) and the problems that arise.
Concerning typesetting source code, I would suggest something as simple as suspending ALL such tricks within \text{} and \starttyping\stoptyping (perhaps parametrized). One could also define something like \shellescape{}, analogous to \quotation{}, to typeset `echo "hello world"` and even \string{} to typeset "string" or 'string', according to the programming language initialized.
indeed this backtick is to be dealt with by a command as it differs per operating system
What I also find disturbing is that *some* of these conventions are retained, but not all.
in principle we can even drop $ and & as we now have primitives for them and # can go also at some point (but unfortunately tex is somewhat sensitive for #s passed in arguments Hans ----------------------------------------------------------------- Hans Hagen | PRAGMA ADE Ridderstraat 27 | 8061 GH Hasselt | The Netherlands tel: 038 477 53 69 | fax: 038 477 53 74 | www.pragma-ade.com | www.pragma-pod.nl -----------------------------------------------------------------