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Comment by jandrese | Hacker News Reader

I'm a little sad that the cute Japanese 「quote characters」 have not gotten traction. I'd love to be able to use those in code.

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First of all, they ARE getting traction. Many Youtubers and Twitch streamers started to use them in stream / video titles. I haven't seen corner barackets at all ten years ago, and these days I see them in use at least once a week.

Some programming languages also start adopting them, too. Raku is the one I know (it allows French and German quotes, too). Maybe Julia, too? I think some language communities tend to be more open to widespread Unicode usage in source code than others.

Those are called Corner Bracket. It took me a while to find out that I have to have CJK font installed in my computer to use the corner bracket. And the file size of CJK font family are huge! More than 100MB.

I see them and the only CJK font on my PC is GNU Unifont, which is only ~12MB for the TTF version IIRC, and smaller for other formats.

Oh GNU Unifont is new for me, thanks for sharing that information. I used other source for CJK (the one that are 100MB)to ensure that I have every single possible uncommon character/glyph installed without chasing for more fonts. One source that have it all in one file. I discovered this because other sources don't always have a full set.

GNU Unifont is a bitmap font with a tiny resolution. Nice to have as a last level fallback, but too ugly for any characters you actually see more than once in a fortnight.

Perl and Raku can probably use them; they've long supported all possible paired quoting characters.

Huh, I didn't know about those. I've been using euro-style « and » though, to be able to copy-paste things that already include " and ', and still delimit what I am quoting.

Guillemets are used in many languages like «this», but 'euro-style' is a bit of a misnomer. They are used all over the world, and in many European languages different pairs are used, such as guillemets the »other« way around, and „this” matching pair.

At least in Germany the closing quotation mark is the other way around like „this“

I believe it's „this“, actually (U-201E to start, U-201C to end), but the distinction between all those quotation marks is hellishly difficult, and I bet native speakers get it wrong all the time.

Once upon a time, I wanted to rely on these distinctions in a TTS frontend to distinguish between 5" floppy disk and "Mambo No. 5"

I soon realized that people use quotation marks and dashes in such a random manner that insisting on treating the semantics literally would create more confusion than it would resolve.

Edit: Now that my comment has posted, I realized you used the correct characters, but the font on my browser rendered them in a seemingly incorrect way, so they looked like double primes.

I take great pride in always typing things like 5¼″ and “Mambo № 5” with the exact Unicode scalars that I desire. I love my Compose key. (I have Compose+'+` produce ′ (prime), Compose+"+` produce ″ (double prime), Compose+:+: produce “, Compose+;+; produce ‘, Compose+"+" produce ”, Compose+'+' produce ’, Compose+N+o produce №, and Compose+1+4 produce ¼.)

See this rather nice map:

https://jakubmarian.com/map-of-quotation-marks-in-european-l...

I like to call «this» the Swiss system, because in Switzerland they use it for four different official languages.

> I've been using euro-style « and » though, to be able to copy-paste things that already include " and ', and still delimit what I am quoting.

That would really be handy on the CLI instead of doing a bunch of escaping with backslashes.

That's just pushing the problem one level down, no?

If you have 3 different sets of quoting characters then you can nest things 3-deep without escaping. How deeply do you actually need to nest?

Sometimes it would be enough.

I've had to run double-depth for loops which then execute an awk script remotely. Three would have been fine.

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