Hi, Werner LEMBERG wrote on Mon, Nov 02, 2020 at 09:42:35AM +0100:
> To summarize: It seems that there is only a single platform left today > that by default uses a bitmap font for terminals with symmetric ` and > ' characters. This sort-of proves my point, doesn't it? I fear you missed the point. What matters is that large numbers of manual pages use unescaped ' and ` to represent plain ASCII ' and ` for programming language syntax documentation - because that has been supported in manual pages for more than a decade, because authors have become used to it, and because it seems likely that before 2008, not many people ever considered mon-ASCII output of manual pages. So dropping support now gratuitiously breaks formatting of large numbers of manual pages in an important way, changing all existing pages would be a huge make-work project, and attempting to re-educate programmers is likely to alienate many of them. The shape of glyphs in some fonts has nothing to do with the issues involved. Admittedly, Jan could have chosen a less misleading example. From the context of his mail, it appeared that he intended `that' as "ASCII backtick quote apostophe-quote" (even though that is ungrammatical in most programming languages i'm aware of), not as "that in single quotes". An example like my_var=`sed 's/foo/bar/g' input.txt` would have been less confusing. Yours, Ingo