Please do not use the ASCII grave accent (0x60) as a left quotation mark together with the ASCII apostrophe (0x27) as the corresponding right quotation mark (as in `quote'). Your text will otherwise appear rather strange with most modern fonts (e.g., on Windows and Mac systems). Only

#2507: quotation characters in error messages -------------------------------------+------------------------------------ Reporter: Isaac Dupree | Owner: Type: feature request | Status: merge Priority: lowest | Milestone: 7.6.2 Component: Compiler | Version: 6.8.3 Resolution: | Keywords: Operating System: Unknown/Multiple | Architecture: Unknown/Multiple Type of failure: None/Unknown | Difficulty: Unknown Test Case: | Blocked By: Blocking: | Related Tickets: #2811,#3398 -------------------------------------+------------------------------------ Comment (by hvr): FYI, just found this related article [http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/quotes.html ASCII and Unicode quotation marks], which is summarised as follows: old X Window System fonts and some old video terminals show ASCII 0x60/0x27 as left and right quotation marks, while most modern systems follow the ISO and Unicode standards instead.

If you can use only ASCII’s typewriter characters, then use the

apostrophe character (0x27) as both the left and right quotation mark (as in 'quote'). If you can use Unicode characters, nice directional quotation marks are available in the form of characters U+2018, U+2019, U+201C, and U+201D (as in ‘quote’ or “quote”). -- Ticket URL: http://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/2507#comment:34 GHC http://www.haskell.org/ghc/ The Glasgow Haskell Compiler