Re:The surprisingly subtle ways Microsoft Word has changed h...
by cubefox on Sunday November 05, 2023 @11:22AM
(#38152502)
Ah, that makes a lot of sense. I'm a little too young to have experience with typewriters. I assume most European typewriter layouts were even more spatially constrained than the US one (due to the presence of special characters not found in the standard Latin Alphabet), so there wasn't much room to allow two quotation marks. And the fixed-width typewriter "font" didn't look properly typographic anyway.
If the straight quote hadn't been invented, the influence in programming languages would have been interesting. Then presumably there would be no common quotation mark present on all keyboards. So perhaps programming languages would have used various kinds of brackets only. Straight quotes aren't great anyway for most things, as they can't really be nested unambiguously.
Re:The surprisingly subtle ways Microsoft Word has changed h...
by cratermoon on Sunday November 05, 2023 @11:33AM
(#38152639)
On the MacBook keyboard with US or CA input, you can get “” with option left bracket/left curly brace and ‘’ with option right bracket/right curly brace. With a little practice it's not that much harder to do. I'm still not quite up to speed with it, but it's nice. Should contractions also use ’?
Now you know.
Re:The surprisingly subtle ways Microsoft Word has changed h...
by WalterBright on Sunday November 05, 2023 @01:06PM
(#38153724)
There's also ASCII. How many characters can you fit into 7 bits? Compromises get made.
Re:The surprisingly subtle ways Microsoft Word has changed h...
by crazygringo on Sunday November 05, 2023 @03:27PM
(#38155306)
Indeed. In hindsight, the tilde (~), backtick (`) and caret (^) turned out to be useless for their original purposes in ASCII -- they'd been used on typewriters to overprint accents, but you couldn't overprint on a computer screen. Same with the underscore (_). While the backslash (\) was a truly strange mark that IBM included for "reverse division", apparently to support ALGOL logical operations ("\/" and "/\").
In hindsight the underscore and backslash been useful in computing, so I'd say we'd have done better to use the tilde and backtick slots for completing pairs of curly quotes instead! Of course, hindsight being 20/20 and all that...
Re:The surprisingly subtle ways Microsoft Word has changed h...
by cubefox on Sunday November 05, 2023 @04:09PM
(#38155675)
I think even underscore and backslash weren't necessary in computing, even though they were put to use once they were there. The @ was also really not necessary. And a lot of those invisible characters weren't either. We should have had just one line break character, since the distinction between CR and LF makes no sense for computers, and certainly caused a lot of incompatibility. As you said, hindsight...
Re:The surprisingly subtle ways Microsoft Word has changed h...
by WalterBright on Sunday November 05, 2023 @04:12PM
(#38155697)
CR and LF made sense for mechanical printers.
LF was used a lot for glass editors connected at low baud rates.
I'm assuming for the same reason American/English keyboards don't have the keys to write “place”, just "place". Which is because American/English typewriters didn't -- they invented straight quotes to save extra keys. And looking up on Google Images, it looks like German typewriters were the same -- Shift+2 was a straight double quote.
It's my personal opinion that this was the original sin -- that typewriters implemented straight quotes rather than curly quotes, to save an extra column of keys. Imagine there's a parallel universe out there, just like ours, except straight quotes were never invented, and everybody actually types opening and closing quotes explicitly, and word processors never had to invent any "smart quotes" feature at all...
Still, I'm more surprised by German typewriters than English ones. In English, you can "get away" with straight quotes, they don't stick out too badly. But in German, the opening quote is in the totally wrong position, at the top instead of the bottom!