Re: Simple string conversion from UCS2 to ISO8859-1

On 2/22/25 10:43 AM, Janis Papanagnou wrote:

On 22.02.2025 13:15, Richard Damon wrote:

>
[...] It did like so many other programs a "pretty" transformation of
a simple single quotation mark, to a fancy version.

 Good to put the "pretty" in quotes; I've seen so many "fancy versions",
one worse than the other. They are culture specific and on a terminal
they often look bad even in their native target form. For example “--”
in a man page (say, 'man awk') has a left and right slant respectively
and they are linear, but my newsreader shows them both in the same
direction but the one thicker at the bottom the other at the top. It's
similar with single quotes; here we often see accents used at one side
and a regular single quote at the other side. In 'man man' for example
we find even a comment on that in the description of option '--ascii'.
There's *tons* of such quoting characters for the various languages,
in my mother tongue there's even _more than one_ type used in printed
media. Single or double and left or right and bottom or top or mixed
or double or single angle brackets in opening and closing form, plus
the *misused* accent characters (which look worst, IMO, especially if
combined inconsistently with other forms).
 I'm glad that in programming there's a bias on symmetric use of the
neutral forms " and ' (for strings and characters and other quoting)
and that things like accents ` and ´ *seem* to gradually vanish for
quoting purposes; e.g. shell `...` long superseded by $(...). Only
document contents occasionally still adhere to trashy use.
 One thing I'd really like to understand is why folks have been mixing
accents with quotes, as in ``standard'' (also taken from 'man awk').
 They may look acceptable in one display or printing device but become
a typographical catastrophe when viewed on another device type.
 </rant>
 Janis

I have more often seen not the "accents" but the curly quotes (one and closed) that look more like elevated commas flipped around.
When used to "escape" a character (or quote a string as an extended escape), people come up with all sorts of ideas, and there sometimes the strange characters were chosen to minimize the need for ways to escape the escape character.