[ygra]

PowerShell acknowledged smart quotes and dashes in its language design and allows proper quotes interchangeably with ASCII straight quotes. I always found that an interesting design choice, although I'm not sure how useful it actually is to allow people to copy/paste code from dubious web pages. On the other hand, they'll do that anyway, so why bother making it harder?

[hibbelig]

This is going down a rabbit hole. “This” is an English quote, whereas „this“ is a German quote; note that the open quote character in the English quote is equal to the close quote character in the German quote.

Then there is a less-often used style of quoting, similar to the French style, but: «this» is the French quote, whereas »this« is the German version. Yes, the open and close quotes are swapped.

I applaud the idea, but just want to point out that there are dragons lurking in the shadows.

[ygra]

All of “”" parse the same as ", so bracketing doesn't really enter into it. This is just to prevent smart quotes from destroying code, not to have more levels of nesting.

[pgcj_poster]

Additionally note that «this» is mostly used in French online and in Switzerland, while « this » is more common in professionally typeset works in France. Those are U+202F NARROW NO-BREAK SPACEs between the guillemets.

[seszett]

Don't forget that the French quotes should have (non-breaking) spaces inside « like this » - only when used with the French language though, other languages usually don't use such spaces.

[tom_]

I've never liked this sort of thing in code, because as things stand they're a bit of a faff to type, and some tools don't support them very well. But it's a shame, because there's loads of types of quote mark and bracket in Unicode, not just the ``...''-type pair commonly used in English. So you could use one type for string delimiters and then use the other types, unescaped, in the string itself.

(The Unicode quotes also mostly come in matching pairs, so, for good or for ill, they'd in principle be nestable.)