Back quote typo in error messages (?)

Hello everyone,

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?

For the sake of completeness, I'm on Mac running Git 2.10.1.

Thanks, Fabrizio

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

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

Jeff King <peff@peff.net> writes:

I did a simpler 

    $ git grep "\`%s'"

and saw "`git %s' is aliased to `%s'" from builtin/help.c and "unknown option `%s'" from parse-options.c (and revision.c)

What Fabrizio saw is the one in parse-options.c, so even though the number of strings in the code is small, they appear everywhere.

I agree that we should standardise them, and we should do so early in a cycle, because these appear also in .po files. It is too late for this cycle, obviously.

On 15 February 2017 at 21:21, Jeff King <peff@peff.net> wrote:

I definitely didn't know about the use of them in traditional typography! But I couldn't find any example of non-symmetric quotes in AsciiDoc...

I had the opposite impression from the quick search in the GitHub repo, this is why I wrote here looking for some confirmation.

I mentioned it was very minor but, still, in my opinion a project like Git deserves consistent punctuation! :)

On Wed, Feb 15, 2017 at 09:51:30PM +0000, Fabrizio Cucci wrote:

Grep for "``" in Git's documentation directory, and you will see many examples (asciidoc only accepts the double-quote form, not singles).

You can also try:

  echo "this is \`\`quoted'' text" >foo.txt
  asciidoc foo.txt

and then open "foo.html" in your browser.

I think patches would be welcome, but as Junio said, it probably should wait for the next cycle.

-Peff

On 15 February 2017 at 21:56, Jeff King <peff@peff.net> wrote:

We are probably going a bit OT here :) but AFAIK there is no such thing as non-symmetric start/end quotes in AsciiDoc.

Even enclosing something in curved quotes is done as follows:

'`single curved quotes`'

"`double curved quotes`"

(http://asciidoctor.org/docs/asciidoc-syntax-quick-reference/)

It can definitely wait and I would be glad to contribute!

On Thu, Feb 16, 2017 at 06:41:26PM +0000, Fabrizio Cucci wrote:

Try the "Quoted Text" section of the original asciidoc user manual:

  http://www.methods.co.nz/asciidoc/userguide.html#X51

Asciidoctor has introduced some new syntax (almost certainly because the original asymmetric formulations have a bunch of ambiguous corner cases). By default, it disables the asymmetric versions, but they work in "compat" mode (and the newer ones do not).

Git's documentation is all written for the original asciidoc. If you build it with asciidoctor, it must be done in compat mode. This is the default when asciidoctor sees a two-line (i.e., underlined) section title, which all of our manpages have.

More details at:

  http://asciidoctor.org/docs/migration/#migration-cheatsheet

Yes, we are off-topic,. but I think it is worth clarifying Git's asciidoc compatibility expectations. :)

-Peff

On 16 February 2017 at 19:02, Jeff King <peff@peff.net> wrote:

I can't say I had the pleasure of using Asciidoctor 0.1.4 or earlier! :)

And I definitely didn't know that, but now I'm glad we went OT! :) Thanks a lot for the clarifications.