Dear Michael Kolodin,

     In your second reply of 19 August, you write:

 > In Russian WinWord:
 > we type "text" and WinWord automatically changes
 > them to corresponding opening and closing double
 > signs which are absent on the keyboard, but exist in
 > cp1251; and ctrl`+", ctrl'+" do the same with English.

So MicroSoft has intelligently adaped its standard
USA features to suit Russia.  Was this not available
under DOS??  Smart quotes appeared on the Mac
about 1987.

 > In TeX: we type <<text ,,intext`` outtext>>.

Since these are ligature driven the printing style seems
to be hardwired in this typing.  The Windows typing

                "text 'intext' outtext"

yields eight-bit code that can be interpreted in many
ways without retyping.  That is a small but palpable
benefit (?) of commercial "wordprocessors". (??)

     I still see little conflict between the ASCII-Cyrillic
use of ' ! \ as "escapes and Russian use of the same
characters in typing 8-bit text.  What am I missing?

               Cheers

                     Laurent Siebenmann