[nitrogen]

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).

[chrisseaton]

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.

[kortilla]

No, iBooks inserting them around commands is the problem.

[progval]

Inserting ASCII quotes instead would result in exactly the same problem.

[kungtotte]

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.

[DagAgren]

They both break what you were trying to do, and the fact that they do it in slightly different ways really isn't worth making a long pedantic argument about.

[kungtotte]

Programming is literally the art of pedantically telling a computer what to do, arguments about it are naturally going to tend towards pedantry. So that's my first point.

The second is that there's a significant difference between "won't run due to syntax errors" and spitting a pasted line back at you since it thinks it's just a string. In a less robust environment the first option might actually crash your environment, or leave you with subtle errors. Like in a shell, it might treat things like escape sequences and things will look off unless you reset them.