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