That’s the Unicode way of doing things (which I heartily subscribe to), but in ASCII’s original conception what you describe as “abuse” was a feature. For instance, in RFC 20 which is dated 1969, 0x27 is named “Apostrophe (Closing Single Quotation Mark/Acute Accent)” and 0x60 is named “Grave Accent (Opening Single Quotation Mark)”. Additionally, double quote also served as a diaeresis, and comma as a cedilla.
Of course, your links are right: it makes no sense to overload these characters anymore now that we have character sets and software capable of providing typographic niceties. But it’s fun to know the history.
Of course, your links are right: it makes no sense to overload these characters anymore now that we have character sets and software capable of providing typographic niceties. But it’s fun to know the history.