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Comment by TheDong | Hacker News Reader

That's incorrect.

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.

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They’re not smart quotes - they're just open and close quotation marks. What is smart about them?

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.

Why do we call them "hot dogs" when they typically have a very low percentage of dog meat (often 0% I think)? Why do we call it a "gravy boat" when it's not literally a boat? Did you know there are male ladybugs?

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.

"gravy boat"

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)

> Why do we call them "hot dogs" when they typically have a very low percentage of dog meat

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.

On my computer quotation marks default to low/high, so it depends on your language setting.

i.e. - the quotes are smart because they adapt to your region.

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