On Tue, 2 Sep 2025, Keith Thompson wrote:
"> I quote Usenet articles in a way which does not endear me to
> persons. Not everyone reacts in the same way. OC Systems asked me how
> do I draw those boxes.

Why do you do that?"

Such a quoting style is correlated with a possibly misguided perception 
that a language does not have a quotation mark at the beginning of each 
intermediate line. Indications that this perception is misguided are 
English documents which are supposedly from decades before Ada 83 which do
indeed show a "“" (i.e. an English opening quotation mark) at the 
beginning of each intermediate line.

However I am not interested enough in English and I do not have enough 
time to investigate whether or not that is the real way to quote in 
English. If one could show me an authoriative document older than the 20th 
century on how to write in English which declares so, then it might nudge 
me.

I had not originally believed that drawing rectangles for embedded 
quotations is annoying, as others used to draw so before me. However, 
unfortunately these rectangles clearly annoy Mister Thompson. Sorry!

"  It seems like a lot of effort to produce an
annoying result."

No effort! As I wrote to OC Systems on
Date: Wed, 2 Jul 2008 16:34:41 -0400 (EDT)
long after I wrote an Emacs-Lisp code for these quotations:
"Thank you for asking. At least so far as I have noticed, you are the
first person to have asked me that even though I have been using them
since last year. They are largely created by an Emacs Lisp function
which I wrote (see far below) to save me labor, [. . .]
[. . .]
[. . .] (Emacs Lisp is terrible, but it is commonly available on
email servers and I was using a buggy Common Lisp program at the time
so I thought that drawing the boxes in Emacs Lisp might serve as some
practice for bug fixing in Common Lisp.)

[. . .]"