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That character is a backtick not a grave isn't it? Also some cultures use «» as quotes. It's a big world.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grave_accent

"Programmers use the grave accent symbol as a separate character (i.e., not combined with any letter) for a number of tasks. In this role, it is known as a backquote or backtick."

ASCII never really supported the idea of a combining character, so it's not surprising that the original intent was subverted.

Heck, in some fonts ` even takes the form of ‛ or ‘. Which is probably where typing quotes like ``this'' comes from (which looks absolutely awful nowadays since it mixes an uncombined diacritic with a kludge of a punctuation character).

ASCII supported combining characters. That’s what backspace was for!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11654682

That was very illuminating, thanks. Interesting that the idea was there originally but was later deprecated when they realized video terminals couldn't do it. Today it would be trivial to convert the sequence letter/backspace/accent to its UTF-8 equivalent.

Is there a difference? I think those are both words for the same character.

It's a backtick when by itself, grave when it's an accent over another character.

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