Hans Aberg <[log in to unmask]> wrote about quotes and punctuation.

In my personal pre-processor for LaTeX (which involves an intermediate
SGML stage under my personal DTD so that, e.g., I can get to HTML
without going through LaTeX), I have provided for myself the following
names:

(Note: "quote" and "quotation" are names of existing LaTeX environments.)

quophrase:  to set the content, possibly only a letter, in standard typeset
            quotation marks;
               Personal: \quophrase{foo text}
                  LaTeX: ``foo text''

quochar:    to provide a *character* (could be a phrase) in "string"
            representation as for documenting C code;
               Personal: \quochar{x}
                  LaTeX: \texttt{`x'}

quostr:     to provide a *string* (could be only a character) in "string"
            representation;
               Personal: \quostr{foo string}
                  LaTeX: \texttt{foo string}

qquostr:    same as "quostr" except that the string is delimited
            with ascii quotation marks, i.e., hex 22, as for documenting
            C code

I do not perceive these as mere macro substitutions when I think about
automatic processing to many possible output formats.  They are about
*content*.

                                   -- Bill Hammond