People can and should be forgiving of errors in casual communications
(if you knew what is should have been, you must have known what was
meant). Compilers frequently are forgiving of variations as well, until
they aren't. I used to use the single quote in COBOL (and still do
everywhere else), until I read (in Don Nelson's COBOL 85 for
Programmers) that it is not officially supported in the standard, and
began to imagine some purgatory where I am forced to manually correct
this problem indefinitely large bodies of code.

Opinions are mine, both linguistic and stylistic. Please flame me
privately to save bandwidth, with NULL in the subject line :-) .

>----------
>From:  Tim Ericson[SMTP:[log in to unmask]]
>Sent:  Wednesday, December 03, 1997 2:24 PM
>To:    [log in to unmask]
>Subject:       [HP3000-L] OFF TOPIC: Today's grammar lesson: The apostrophe
>andyou.
>
<snip>
>Never use apostrophes as quotation marks to set off words or phrases
>(unless you need a quotation within a quotation).
<snip>