5 ms·

That may be a typo. Macs have a feature that automatically converts ' and " into ‘ and “ called "smart quotes." It's innocuous most of the time and maybe even

by adregan 10y ago

That may be a typo. Macs have a feature that automatically converts ' and " into ‘ and “ called "smart quotes." It's innocuous most of the time and maybe even welcome, but can be a real pain when trying to share a command with someone (who is probably going to copy and paste it, receive an error and not know why).

jcoffland 10y ago
This is a good example of where Apple should have followed the KISS principal.
- Jtsummers 10y ago
  To be fair, as a Mac user I've only ever encountered that when using some rich text editors, but primarily word processors where your literal text isn't what you want (WYSIWYG editors). When dealing with plain text, even in browser comment blocks, it's always left my ' and " characters alone.
  - wiredfool 10y ago
    I think I've run across that in the wordpress editor as well.
    - Jtsummers 10y ago
      Right, and, again, it's likely what you want 99% of the time (unless you're copy/pasting more code examples than prose). I'd be surprised if this isn't typical behavior of many blogging platforms.
yellowapple 10y ago
Microsoft Office has this "feature", too. LaTeX (and probably TeX alone, but I never use it without LaTeX) supports something similar, but AFAICT only in appropriate contexts (matching pairs of `` and '' are converted to the appropriate quote, as are ` and ', but they don't seem to affect "typewriter text", so the smart quotes stay out of my code snippets). Or maybe I just haven't noticed LaTeX munging all over my document.
- AlphaSite 10y ago
  Actually my experience with quoting in LaTeX has not been fun.
ygra 10y ago
Fun fact: PowerShell recognizes smart quotes just like normal quotes, so you can delimit a string with “, ”, or " if you want. Same with en-dash and hyphen-minus. One might argue, though, whether it's really a good thing to be resilient against crappy WordPress blogs, since it encourages running copy-pasted code from the web. But I guess that would happen anyway, regardless of language designer intentions and a little frustration with copy-pasting won't cause people to actually read the code they're running.

by adregan 10y ago

jcoffland 10y ago

This is a good example of where Apple should have followed the KISS principal.

Jtsummers 10y ago
To be fair, as a Mac user I've only ever encountered that when using some rich text editors, but primarily word processors where your literal text isn't what you want (WYSIWYG editors). When dealing with plain text, even in browser comment blocks, it's always left my ' and " characters alone.
- wiredfool 10y ago
  I think I've run across that in the wordpress editor as well.
  - Jtsummers 10y ago
    Right, and, again, it's likely what you want 99% of the time (unless you're copy/pasting more code examples than prose). I'd be surprised if this isn't typical behavior of many blogging platforms.

yellowapple 10y ago

Microsoft Office has this "feature", too. LaTeX (and probably TeX alone, but I never use it without LaTeX) supports something similar, but AFAICT only in appropriate contexts (matching pairs of `` and '' are converted to the appropriate quote, as are ` and ', but they don't seem to affect "typewriter text", so the smart quotes stay out of my code snippets). Or maybe I just haven't noticed LaTeX munging all over my document.

AlphaSite 10y ago
Actually my experience with quoting in LaTeX has not been fun.

ygra 10y ago

Fun fact: PowerShell recognizes smart quotes just like normal quotes, so you can delimit a string with “, ”, or " if you want. Same with en-dash and hyphen-minus. One might argue, though, whether it's really a good thing to be resilient against crappy WordPress blogs, since it encourages running copy-pasted code from the web. But I guess that would happen anyway, regardless of language designer intentions and a little frustration with copy-pasting won't cause people to actually read the code they're running.