Why would you prefer single quotes over double quotes? An apostrophe is not just punctuation in English, it is necessary to preserve the meaning of certain words (like &quot;its&quot;&#x2F;&quot;it&#x27;s&quot;). So in a way, it can be considered to be another, albeit rare, letter of the alphabet. Now if somebody proposed to delineate strings with the character &quot;x&quot; everyone would agree it&#x27;s a bad idea. For the same reason, using &quot;&#x27;&quot; to delineate strings is also bad, and shouldn&#x27;t be encouraged.