Re: Back quote typo in error messages (?)

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Feb 15, 2017, 21:21 UTC
Message-ID: <20170215212157.qgscyglgzrd5cplf@sigill.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <CAOxYW4z=bABqhmHWCc9rizykMcGBjDvqLEuqpJ6DtPve5442Fw@mail.gmail.com>

On Wed, Feb 15, 2017 at 09:06:46PM +0000, Fabrizio Cucci wrote:

Show 13 quoted lines

> it's been a couple of days that I keep noticing something (very minor)
> that my OCD for symmetric things can't really stand.
> 
> If you run the following command:
> 
> $ git branch --i-dont-exists
> 
> you should get:
> 
> error: unknown option `i-dont-exists'
> 
> Shouldn't the wrong flag be surrounded by two single quotes instead of
> a back quote and a single quote?

Some people use the matched backtick/single-quote to emulate the non-symmetric start/end quotes used in traditional typography (and in fact, ``foo'' in languages like asciidoc are typically rendered using smart-quotes).

So I think what you are seeing is not wrong in the sense of being unintended by the author of the message. But I do think that git mostly uses matched double or single quotes in its error messages, and the non-symmetric quotes are relatively rare. Running:

  git grep "\`.*'" -- '*.c' ':!compat'

shows that there are only a few `quoted' cases in the code base (there are 27 matches, but many of those are false positives, and some are in comments).

I don't know how much we care about standardizing that punctuation. If we do, I suspect there is also inconsistency between single-quotes and double-quotes ('foo' versus "foo", which I think is an American versus European thing; we seem to mostly use 'foo', though).

-Peff