Re: Getting Emacs to play nice with Hunspell and apostrophes

[Rusi]

On Tuesday, June 17, 2014 7:12:11 AM UTC+5:30, Garreau, Alexandre wrote:
> On 2014-06-14 at 16:51, Yuri Khan wrote:
> > The GCC error messages in the en_US.utf8 locale, on the other hand, do
> > use curly quotes.

> Indeed, just because “computer English” is made for computers, not human
> beings, who prefer to have readable text, just like it was before
> typewriters.

> > OK, I do not suggest that Perl should drop its backtick operator or
> > that computer languages universally start using curly quotes for
> > character and string literals (although that would make many languages
> > more elegant by simplifying parsing). But how about we reserve all
> > these artificial characters for computer languages, one of which
> > English is not.

> Having more language neutral programming languages would be cool, even
> languages based on semantic interpretation of binary data that would
> move the complexity of syntactic representation of its content from data
> toward editor would be really more useful, clean, simple, egalitarian,
> etc.


Interesting thread that I missed…

As a noob member of the «enthusiastically embrace unicode» camp 

Ironically I was introduced to the possibility of using unicode by
gmail tantalizingly showing me an अ [devanagari letter A] Later on
however Ive found gmail too clever in how it transliterates eg a into
अ. emacs is more predictable. So now I type into emacs and paste into
gmail if necessary.

So I'd like to express my thanks that emacs is doing unicode very well

And now that programming languages — the original forté of emacs —
are beginning to get out of ASCII-hell, here are two of my blog posts.

I started by writing 
http://blog.languager.org/2014/04/unicoded-python.html
to express my wishlist (for python) for getting out of ASCII-prison 
and into what you call a more 'neutral' frame¹

Discovered later that Haskell is already doing some of this
http://blog.languager.org/2014/05/unicode-in-haskell-source.html
[And a good deal more]

And finally APL is making a resurgence: http://baruchel.hd.free.fr/apps/apl/

> > Otherwise, primarily, the material will be read by a human being, and
> > only secondarily in a computer program. I wish for a future where the
> > Web replaces the printed book, therefore, the Web must do all things
> > books do, and then some.

> I hope that by “the Web” you mean “the concept of the ensemble of linked
> interpreted documents to read shared by the medium of computer networks
> and read on computers interfaces”, not the poor current implementation
> of it, which is still using obsolete and despotic client–server model
> (<http://thewebmustdie.com/>, <http://secushare.org/>).

> > Yes, LaTeX does a lot to produce a beautifully typeset printout from
> > an ASCII source. This is not enough; I want that same beautiful
> > typesetting on screen, in browser, in any page width I happen to have,
> > in my favorite typeface and font size, without having to recompile the
> > document. And at the same time, it does too much. It has to maintain,
> > and document authors have to utilize, a multitude of workarounds that
> > are caused by TeX not using Unicode internally.

> Having something technically and typographically good like LaTeX,
> semantic and interpreted like HTML and language-neutral like
> markdown/any-binary-interpreted-format would be great.

Yes its important that we start moving to xetex (luatex) where I can
directly write α etc than \alpha.  Just have to multiply this one char
by the 100s that occur in proofs and we should see why the latter is
clunky, ugly, unreadable, bug-spreading compared to the former

PS [Travelling for a few days so may not respond to responses]

¹ Dare I say 'universal'? As math is the only language
approaching universality known to humanity.