> That's how quoting works by default in m4 and TeX, both defined in the 70s. Good point. And it was in m4[1] I saw that backtick+apostrophe syntax. I would

> That's how quoting works by default in m4 and TeX, both defined in the 70s. Good point. And it was in m4[1] I saw that backtick+apostrophe syntax. I would have probably not thought of that possibility if I hadn’t seen it there. [1] Probably on Wikipedia since I have never used it > Unfortunately Unicode retconned the ASCII apostrophe character ' to be a vertical line, maybe out of a misguided deference to Microsoft Windows, and now we all have to suffer the consequences. (Unless we're using Computer Modern fonts or other fonts that predate this error, such as VGA font ROM dumps.) I do think the vertical line looks subpar (and I don’t use it in prose). But most programmers don’t seem bothered by it. :| > In the 70s and 80s, and into the current millennium on Unix, `x' did look like ‘x’, but now instead it looks like dogshit. Emacs tries to render it like ‘x’ since it uses backtick+apostrophe for quotes. With some mixed results in my experience. > Even if you are willing to require a custom font for readability, though, that doesn't solve the problem; you need some way to include an apostrophe in your quoted string! Aha, I honestly didn’t even think that far. Seems a bit restrictive to not be able to use possessives and contractions in strings without escapes. > As for end delimiters, C itself supports multicharacter literals, which are potentially useful for things like Macintosh type and creator codes, or FTP commands. I should have made it clear that I was only considering C-likes and not C itself. A language from the C trigraph days can be excused. To a certain extent.