Ben C wrote:
> On 2008-04-14, Jukka K. Korpela <jkorpela@cs.tut.fi> wrote:
>> Scripsit Thomas 'PointedEars' Lahn:
>>
>>> I think you would agree that it would make especially English text
>>> with quotations in direct speech (say, in a novel where one person
>>> tells another what a third said) quite badly legible if somewhere
>>> there is an apostrophe represented by ’ in the inner quotation,
>> No I wouldn't. Such usage is _standard_ English, to the extent anything
>> is standard in English. Consult the applicable style guide and then the
>> Unicode Standard, which identifies the punctuation marks at the level of
>> coded characters.
>>
>>> Since apostrophes appear to occur quite often in English texts, I have
>>> therefore decided that in my English texts, ' (the straight
>>> apostrophe, &apos; or ') is the appropriate character for all
>>> apostrophes
>> That's computerize or typewriterese - abhorred, disliked, and frowned
>> upon by typographers and grammars.
>
> Style guides and grammar books just tell you when to use apostrophes.
> They don't say anything about whether you should use U+0027 or U+2019 to
> represent them.
>
> PointedEars is right that using U+2019 to write an apostrophe is
> obviously illogical, although I don't agree that it causes any real
> ambiguity or legibility problems for human readers.

It's "illogical" in the semantic sense but since the single closing
quote and the apostrophe are assigned the same appearance by convention
it isn't any more illogical than using the Unicode exclamation point for
factorials, instead of setting off a separate code point for the
factorial mark so that some day a wacko type designer can design a font
in which the factorial symbol looks different from the exclamation point.

> But do you know _why_ the Unicode Standard recommends using U+2019?
>
> U+0027 is called the "apostrophe"

Well, that's what it was called when it was the typewriter apostrophe
and there were no curly quotes to be seen anywhere--and their use as
single quotes was infrequent.

> but then the description says "neutral
> (vertical) glyph with mixed usage" (whatever that's supposed to mean-- I
> thought we were talking about a character not a glyph) and then goes on
> about how the wonderful U+2019 is preferred for practically everything.
>
> Typographers may be right that a curlier glyph looks better, but then why
> not just map the curlier glyph to both U+2019 and U+0027 in the font?

Because we don't want no curly apostrophes in our stinkin' C++.

> I don't understand the case against U+0027.