RE: Matching opening and closing characters: How?

From: Erkki I. Kolehmainen (eik@iki.fi)
Date: Sun Aug 16 2009 - 05:50:34 CDT

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    Just to add another variation:
    In Finnish, the opening and closing quotes are nowadays always the same, be
    they single, double or angle quotes.

    Erkki I. Kolehmainen
    Tilkankatu 12 A 3, FI-00300 Helsinki, Finland
    Puh. (09) 4368 2643, 0400 825 943; Tel. +358 9 4368 2643, +358 400 825 943

    -----Original Message-----
    From: unicode-bounce@unicode.org [mailto:unicode-bounce@unicode.org] On
    Behalf Of Joachim Durchholz
    Sent: Saturday, August 08, 2009 2:54 AM
    To: unicode@unicode.org
    Subject: Re: Matching opening and closing characters: How?

    Thanks for all the feedback.

    Here's my updated thinking:

    * The mention of ]...[ got me thinking. I was aiming for making all kinds of
    parentheses into the equivalent of (...), but it's important to allow people
    to define operators like |...| (say, if they are designing a set of
    operators that should mimick mathematical conventions as closely as
    possible). In other words, different pairs of parentheses would have
    different, programmer-defined semantics, which means the programmer names
    the parenthese pair anyway and I don't need to rely on Unicode to classify
    parentheses.

    * For quotes, what's the initial and what's the final quote isn't that
    important actually, they can exchange roles. It would be enough to make sure
    that the final quote is one of several valid matches to the initial quotes.
    For example, in German, the initial quote is a low left one and the final a
    right high one, while in English, it's a high left and a high right quote.
    So high right would pair up with both low left and high left - which would
    be fully sufficient. Maybe it's enough to have a fully relaxed rule: any
    quote character will do instead of ".

    * On the other hand, the usefulness of locale-specific quotes is dubious, so
    maybe it's indeed enough to stick with the traditional " and ' quotes from
    programming languages. On the third hand, it might be an interesting
    experiment to see what use programmer put the ability to use arbitrary
    quotes.

    I'll have to think about quotes a bit more, I think.

    Again, thanks for all the input.

    Regards,
    Jo

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