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Comment by PhasmaFelis | Hacker News Reader

Almost totally off topic, why in God's name would you substitute double-backticks and double-single-quotes for actual quotes?

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It's LaTeX syntax.

Also: Because there is no symbol for quotation marks on the keyboard? Technically, " is a unit symbol for inch and not a quotation mark, which would be weird because there is only one of these on the keyboard but left and right quotation are different symbols.

    > " is a unit symbol for inch and not a quotation mark

Can you think of any reliable source that supports this claim? The printable characters in the original standard are defined in a table of glyphs with no other meaning attached to them. In unicode, the corresponding character, U+0022, is defined as "QUOTATION MARK". You're not helping anyone by making things up.

I remembered reading an article that made the case that computer keyboards evolved from scientific calculators which had the arcmin and arcsec symbols but no use for quotation marks.

After thinking about this for a bit and reading Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotation_mark#Non-language_rel...) I am starting to think that this is wrong. Keyboards obviously mirror the typewriter and not the calculator. Thanks for making me think about this!

Left and right quotes are only different symbols in print, as I'm sure you're aware. There's also no keys for stylistic ligatures on the keyboard, but people still manage to type "fi".

In 1995, this was a fairly common technique to produce smart quotes :-)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotation_mark_glyphs#Typewrite...

LaTeX habits.

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