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by tedunangst 2310 days ago
Because they result in a syntax error.
2 comments

Even though the OP seems offended by the presence of the Unicode quote marks for some reason, they have nothing to do with the issue of Apple Books surrounding the copied text with those quote marks and adding an attribution line. If they'd surrounded the text with ASCII quote marks and added an attribution line, it would have still been a syntax error, wouldn't it.

Personally, I don't see any reason to hate typographically correct quote marks when used correctly, which (obviously) doesn't include code samples.

But they wouldn’t do what you wanted anyway if they were ASCII. What’s the problem specifically with them being Unicode?
The problem specifically is that they are not the ASCII quote character. There is only one ASCII quote character, and that's the one used by programming languages. Any other quote or quote-like character is outside the ASCII range, and must therefore be Unicode (or another non-ASCII code page).
I know they're not compatible with programming languages that you may want to use. But that's the languages' problem. They're perfectly valid, standardised, characters.
No, iBooks inserting them around commands is the problem.
Inserting ASCII quotes instead would result in exactly the same problem.
Not exactly the same. Since anything inside ASCII quotes is typically considered a valid string in most programming languages, if you delete everything after the final quotation mark you have a syntactically valid program. It won't do what you want, but it's not a syntax error.

So unicode quotes and ASCII quotes are not exactly the same in this scenario.