[Doc-SIG] using the same delimiter on the left and right..

[Guido van Rossum]

> Actually, the example you picked strikes me as a rather extraordinary
> case, where you're talking about the literal code:
> 
>     'c'
> 
> and
> 
>     'cc'
> 
> I agree that we would want to provide for expressing such stuff, and need
> some escapes for them, but *writing about the punctunation* doesn't strike
> me as a common case.

It does seem common to me.  This has tripped me up several times in
ZWikis already, and I know that I write *about* literals a lot.  Also
note that plenty of folks (including me, sometimes) use 'single
quotes' to quote phrases.  Making that a constant-width font is ugly
and wrong; forcing them not to do that is also going against the
purported goal of ST (which seems to be that we can continue to write
text like we're used to, and it will 'automatically' be formatted
right).

I am arguing against specific cases of automatic formatting that seem
to be based in less-than-universal conventions.  (Note that I've never
complained about *emph* -- it works well -- but 'literal' just
doesn't.)

> That said, i also agree that there are other times in regular text where i
> want the "'" apostrophes to show through.  Again, escapes could provide 
> for that.

I'd rather use a more explicit way to indicate literals.  POD's choice
is not so bad here, even if you don't like =head1.

--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)