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Yeah, no. ASCII assuredly has had what it officially called "opening single quotation mark" at 0x40, and "closing single quotation mark" at 0x27, for a very lon

Yeah, no. ASCII assuredly has had what it officially called "opening single quotation mark" at 0x40, and "closing single quotation mark" at 0x27, for a very long time. For starters, most easily at hand, see Communications of the ACM, Vol. 8, No. 4, April 1965, page 207, which shows them by those names. Of course, there are details. It says that the 0x40 character can also be used as a grave accent, but only if "preceded by an alphabetic character and a BS (Backspace) in that sequence." Oh, for the days of hard-copy terminals. And 0x27 is worse. It is documented there to be used as Apostrophe, closing single quotation mark, and even acute accent (but again, only in the context of the three character sequence alpha-backspace-accent). Fine, that was 1965, and no controversy. But following the actual ANSI standard along over the years, by 2007 they're still there in "Coded Character Sets - 7-Bit American National Standard Code for Information Interchange (7-Bit ASCII)" ANSI INCITS 4-1986 (R2007) / ANSI X3.4-1986 (R2007), Approved June 14, 2007; Table 7, page 12. (Well, in 1986 they'd been slightly renamed to be Left and Right Single Quotation Mark, so the names would make sense for right-to-left languages, too; just as Paren, Bracket, and Brace pairs had all also changed names from "Open/Close" to "Left/Right".) The subsequent revisions to the ASCII standard, of June 15, 2012 and November 2, 2017, I don't have copies of, but these character designations clearly lasted at least into the "updated definitions" current as of mid 2012. So, left and right single quotes were clearly in the official standard for almost five full decades beyond "early ASCII". I expect that they survive still, and will soon go into their seventh decade, but happy to hear otherwise from anyone with access to the later standard documents. (And, yes, of course the Unicode standard has its own (no doubt better) opinions about what goes on with the first 128 characters out of tens of thousands, and what they're called and what they're properly used for; but that's a different issue than what the ASCII standard itself has to say about cramming stuff into its overloaded character set with a grand total of 128 slots.)

svat 4y ago
Yeah you're right and good point, and my earlier comment was partly misleading anyway, because there isn't much difference even among typographers between "apostrophe" and "right single quotation mark". A better way of stating it is to start with appearance: people who started with computers where 0x40 ` and 0x27 ' looked symmetric (like ‘ and ’) would likely end up using them as symmetric quotation marks (thus the conventions used in some software like Emacs and TeX), while everyone else, where they were not symmetric (looking slanted and vertical respectively) would likely not be led down that route. It's a bit unfortunate that there was this divergence, and that it wasn't settled early enough. An interesting example is The TeXbook itself: the 1979 TeX manual (in the "TeX and METAFONT" book), the precursor to The TeXbook and apparently written with mostly the SAIL environment in mind, simply says (early in Chapter 2): > In the first place, there are two kinds of quotation marks in books, but only one kind on the typewriter. Even on your computer terminal, which has more characters than an ordinary typewriter, you probably have only a non-oriented double quote mark (") because the standard “ascii” code for computers was not invented with book publishing in mind. However, your terminal probably does have two flavors of single-quote marks, namely ’ and ’, which you can get by typing ` and ´. The second of these is useful also as an apostrophe. While already in 1984, The TeXbook (second printing, October 1984: the earliest I have access to), written with more awareness of the rest of the world, has more-or-less the same text, but adds: > American keyboards usually contain a left-quote character that shows up as something like `, and an apostrophe or right-quote that looks like ' or ´. So already the appearance did differ across different systems. There's a bit more on another related page of Kuhn at https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/apostrophe.html https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/apostrophe.html (this one is about the opposite problem: Europeans using acute accent as apostrophe), and there's a bit more about history of these two ASCII positions at https://jkorpela.fi/latin1/ascii-hist.html https://jkorpela.fi/latin1/ascii-hist.html

svat 4y ago

Yeah you're right and good point, and my earlier comment was partly misleading anyway, because there isn't much difference even among typographers between "apostrophe" and "right single quotation mark". A better way of stating it is to start with appearance: people who started with computers where 0x40 ` and 0x27 ' looked symmetric (like ‘ and ’) would likely end up using them as symmetric quotation marks (thus the conventions used in some software like Emacs and TeX), while everyone else, where they were not symmetric (looking slanted and vertical respectively) would likely not be led down that route. It's a bit unfortunate that there was this divergence, and that it wasn't settled early enough. An interesting example is The TeXbook itself: the 1979 TeX manual (in the "TeX and METAFONT" book), the precursor to The TeXbook and apparently written with mostly the SAIL environment in mind, simply says (early in Chapter 2): > In the first place, there are two kinds of quotation marks in books, but only one kind on the typewriter. Even on your computer terminal, which has more characters than an ordinary typewriter, you probably have only a non-oriented double quote mark (") because the standard “ascii” code for computers was not invented with book publishing in mind. However, your terminal probably does have two flavors of single-quote marks, namely ’ and ’, which you can get by typing ` and ´. The second of these is useful also as an apostrophe. While already in 1984, The TeXbook (second printing, October 1984: the earliest I have access to), written with more awareness of the rest of the world, has more-or-less the same text, but adds: > American keyboards usually contain a left-quote character that shows up as something like `, and an apostrophe or right-quote that looks like ' or ´. So already the appearance did differ across different systems. There's a bit more on another related page of Kuhn at https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/apostrophe.html https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/apostrophe.html (this one is about the opposite problem: Europeans using acute accent as apostrophe), and there's a bit more about history of these two ASCII positions at https://jkorpela.fi/latin1/ascii-hist.html https://jkorpela.fi/latin1/ascii-hist.html