[Python-ideas] Smart/Curly Quote Marks and cPython

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Sat, Oct 22, 2016 at 01:17:58AM -0400, Ryan Birmingham wrote:
> Hello everyone,
> 
> I want to start small and ask about smart/curly quote marks (” vs ").

Which curly quotes are you going to support? There's Dutch, of course:

„…” ‚…’

But how about … ?

- English ‘…’ “…”

- French « … » “…”

- Swiss «…» ‹…›

- Hebrew „…” ‚…’

- Hungarian „…”	»…«

- Icelandic „…“ ‚…‘

- Japanese 「…」 『…』

- Polish „…” «…» »…«

- Swedish ”…” ’…’ »…» »…«

to mention only a few. I think it would be unfair to all the non-Dutch 
programmers if we only supported Dutch quotation marks, but as you can 
see, supporting the full range of internationalised curly quotes is 
difficult.


> Although most languages do not support these characters as quotation marks,
> I believe that cPython should, if possible.

You say "most" -- do you know which programming languages support 
typographical quotation marks for strings? It would be good to see a 
survey of which languages support this feature, and how they cope with 
the internationalisation problem.

I think this is likely to be just too hard. There's a reason why 
programming has standardized on the lowest common denominator for 
quotation marks '' "" and occasionally `` as well.


-- 
Steve