On 20-1-2010 8:28, Alan BRASLAU wrote:
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.
one can always write small script that converts `` '' to \quotation
(actually one of my reasons for never using `` '' is that it looks quite
ugly in the source as the second pair is not tilted and i hate ugly
looking sources)
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.
indeed this backtick is to be dealt with by a command as it differs per
operating system
What I also find disturbing is that *some* of these conventions are retained,
but not all.
in principle we can even drop $ and & as we now have primitives for them
and # can go also at some point (but unfortunately tex is somewhat
sensitive for #s passed in arguments
Hans
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