Exactly. Now add to that the complication that ''' supposedly means something completely different from _both_ of those when it's not in the middle of a word, and that (as with much of the syntax) there has never been any well-defined rule governing this behavior, only a last-resort hack in PHP code. It's not simple conceptually, and it's far from simple for the computer, and it's bad for parsing. I hate to be argumentative, but I don't believe that the issue is as simple (heh) as you make it out to be, Nicolas.
I don't believe either it's simple, conceptually or computer-ally (whao, a neologism).
Merely pointing out that: 1) there'd be many broken page if the syntax was changed, and some huge work to fix everything 2) people (on w:fr:, can't tell other languages) would be simply really bothered by the change, and would simply revolt to go hang the people changing everything :)
Nicolas Weeger