On Tue, 2011-12-20 at 15:44 -0800, Karl Berry wrote: > Paolo, since Paul clearly feels strongly about this, can you change the > wording to allow either one? Then we can see what rms says.
I'm afraid I don't quite understand the proposed change. >From the point of view of an implementor, which I am, I always write all my strings in the C locale: that's how gettext works. All the translations I support come to me from the Translation Project: I don't write any of them, not even the putative "en" UTF8-based translation (which, as has been pointed out, doesn't exist in most if not all projects: they simply fall back to the C locale). Like it or not, and many don't, the previous behavior was quite clear: in the C locale, you should use `...' quoting. The new behavior is not clear to me as an implementor; it says: In the C locale, GNU programs should stick to plain ASCII for quotation characters in messages to users: preferably 0x27 (@samp{'}) for both opening and closing quotes. [...] If you support internationalization, translators should be able to provide their own quote characters. By convention, the string @samp{"`"} will translate to the opening quote and the string @samp{"'"} will translate to the closing quote. I don't understand how to reconcile these two paragraphs. The first paragraph above says use '...'. The second says that translators will translate "`" to an opening quote and "'" to a closing quote... but I won't have those in my code if I follow the direction in the first paragraph. -- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Paul D. Smith <psm...@gnu.org> Find some GNU make tips at: http://www.gnu.org http://make.mad-scientist.net "Please remain calm...I may be mad, but I am a professional." --Mad Scientist