What is a soft quote?
iOS at the least by default will substitute "dumb" quotes with smart quotes in text boxes.
This is a double quote: ", 0x22, ascii
This is a smart open quote: “, 0x201c, unicode
This is a smart close quote: ”, 0x201d, unicode
By default your keyboard double-quote key produces the ascii double quote mark, and that is what's used for quoting in virtually every programming language.
Word and many email clients will use smart-quotes by default, but they're pretty rare in programming, hence why the "some among us" phrasing calling them out as strange.
That's what the linked repo is referring to by soft quotes, and the command given specifically uses 0x201d above.
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.
Language is descriptive, and people do in fact call them smart quotes. That doesn't mean there has to be anything smart about them, and I'm not making the claim there is, I'm just using an agreed-upon term to convey what I'm talking about.
Cause it's shaped like a simple boat. Or sort of is. Kind of like how 'soft quotes' are considered soft because they aren't in a very hard like up and down position, and are instead positioned like a feather softly falling. (or so I guess)
Because historically, the insinuation was that cheap sausages contained dog meat, that’s why. Someone has answered your gravyboat question. And your ladybug example is bordering on blatant troll baiting.
> Language is descriptive, and people do in fact call them smart quotes. That doesn't mean there has to
Some “people” call them ATM machines even though the M stands for machine.
> I'm just using an agreed-upon term to convey what I'm talking about.
The agreed upon terms are Left Double Quotation Mark and Right Double Quotation Mark - nothing about smart quotes in the Unicode tables.
I get that the term smart is used colloquially - but your comment suggests that their Unicode names are “smart”. I do think it is overall silly and confusing to refer to the characters themselves based on some formatting or automatic insertion feature.
i.e. - the quotes are smart because they adapt to your region.
‘|’|“|”
For example: 10° 33' 19" -> 10° 33« 19». Very smart!
A PM somewhere probably thought "smart quotes" sounded neat, and here we are.
[a]: On my computers, I’ll use "dumb" quotes. Easy way to see where I typed a comment from, I guess.
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?
Further, if you check my sibling comment you'll see that it is a common mistake for beginner/intermediate coders to paste these quotes into code. This is the source of the "cultural debate" in this instance. They are making a judgement about how this common copy/paste problem shows up in practice. Not a judgement about "proper usage".
It's honestly a little surprising that you took this so personally. It reads rather playfully in my opinion.
I never knew you could do that! I've got very frustrated sometimes typing on an iPad when I really want a dumb quote, and, unlike on macOS where the dumb quote is the default and there's the convenient if baffling OPT-[ shortcut to get “ and OPT-SHIFT-[ for ”, I couldn't figure out what to do to my default smart quote to get a dumb quote. Thanks!