HN mining or: How I learned that there are some among us with soft quotes

And of course there’s the overload of hyphen and minus, such that Unicode gave up and named U+002D “hyphen‐minus,” and created two separate characters U+2212 “minus” (−) and U+2010 “hyphen” (‐) to use in situations where the typography matters. Most fonts seem to use identical glyphs for hyphen‐minus and minus, but I’ve seen some that try to split the difference, giving hyphen‐minus a glyph with a height and width somewhere in between hyphen and minus.

If you find minus and hyphen‐minus hard to distinguish visually, just remember that a true minus sign looks just like a plus without the vertical part. Compare the alignments:

- example (U+002D hyphen‐minus)

+ example (plus)

− example (U+2212 minus)

Of course, your links are right: it makes no sense to overload these characters anymore now that we have character sets and software capable of providing typographic niceties. But it’s fun to know the history.

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.)

And I don’t see how one is any “softer” than the other.

People’s programming editors often do paren matching - does that make them smart parens? No they’re still just regular old parens.

If someone can explain why it's not just egotism, please go right ahead. Otherwise, it really does seem like it. To me at least.

Other comments try to sort of deal with this problem in their explanations about soft and hard quotes, but they don't really deal with the part about it being disturbing.

What's so disturbing about using a feature available on your device? Especially when it does nothing harmful to the user, or recipients of that users communications?