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A comment on My last name makes me invisible to Computers (2015). Parent comment

Re:My last name makes me invisible to Computers (2015) by jamescostian on Friday August 18, 2017 @11:30AM (#15047047)
I think this style might come from TeX, based on this comment: https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/17695/any-refere...

Manpages aren't written in TeX though (apparently they use something called "roff"), but they also contain things like `read' instead of 'read'... perhaps manpage writers tended to like TeX too?

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Re:My last name makes me invisible to Computers (2015) by gpvos on Friday August 18, 2017 @06:16PM (#15050185)
Probably the other way round: roff/troff/nroff is older than TeX. I guess that on old computer typesetters, ` and ' turned into nicely balanced quotes.
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Re:My last name makes me invisible to Computers (2015) by tankenmate on Saturday August 19, 2017 @12:20PM (#15054169)
roff was the financial back reason that Unix moved from PDP-7 / assembler to PDP-11 / C.

http://www.read.seas.harvard.edu/~kohler/class/aosref/ritchi...

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