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. 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. What I also find disturbing is that *some* of these conventions are retained, but not all. Alan