On Wednesday 18 April 2012 16:39:53 Tom Tromey wrote:
> >>>>> "John" == John Gilmore <gnu@toad.com> writes:
> John> PS:  When did g++ start outputting non-ascii (Unicode) backquotes
> John> and forward-quotes in its error messages?  That's truly ugly.  Look
> John> at the compiler output in Emacs, for example.
> 
> There's some long threads about this all over GNUdom.
> I can't remember when, it seems like a long time ago now.

at least they've started moving away from the left quote being a backtick.  
but yes, i believe GNU projects have been doing unicode quotes for a while.

recent gnulib commit:
commit 1a43a982c927eaf26bbc2701a872009d9be4b33b
Author: Paolo Bonzini <bonzini@gnu.org>
Date:   Sun Dec 18 15:44:17 2011 +0100

    quotearg: do not use grave accent for left quote
    
    * lib/quotearg.c (gettext_quote): Map "`" to "'" for locale_quoting_style.
    (quotearg_buffer_restyled): Fix example.
    * tests/test-quotearg-simple.c (results_g): Adjust test vectors.

and indeed, grep-2.11 says:
	Try 'grep --help' for more information.
where it once said:
	Try `grep --help' for more information.
-mike