Re: [PATCH] --color-words: Make the word characters configurable

[Johannes Schindelin <Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de>]

Hi,

On Sat, 3 May 2008, Teemu Likonen wrote:

> Johannes Schindelin wrote (2008-05-03 15:03 +0100):
> 
> > Now, you can specify which characters are to be interpreted as word
> > characters with "--color-words=A-Za-z", or by setting the config
> > variable diff.wordCharacters.
> > 
> > Signed-off-by: Johannes Schindelin <johannes.schindelin@gmx.de>
> > ---
> > 
> > 	I would have preferred an approach like this.
> 
> Unfortunately this does not work at all with other than Ascii 
> characters. It makes --color-words completely unusable for anything 
> other than Ascii text. Sorry.

Sorry, but the original way was also only meant for ASCII.  The fact that 
isspace() happens to work with UTF-8 does _not_ mean that it was any more 
useful with non-ASCII: think UTF-16.

So no, I do not buy into your ASCII argument at all.

> Ping Yin's version has also the problem that UTF-8 multibyte characters
> U+0080..U+10FFFF don't work in diff.nonwordchars. Fortunately the most
> important word delimiters are in U+0000..U+007F (=Ascii) area so Ping's
> version is perfectly usable with Unicode text.
>
> (Even the old --color-words behaviour with only SPACE as non-word char 
> was perfectly usable with Unicode text.)

See above.

> I, too, would like to see Ping's patch series merged in.

I have no problems with the intention.  But I have problems with the 
design.  It is no less ASCII-bound than what I proposed, it wants you to 
specify what does _not_ make a word character (making every newbie, and 
me, too, going "Huh?").

And I also commented on the artificial limitations by design: I think it 
is a big mistake to limit the user's options when it would be easy not to, 
just because the designer could not think of useful applications.

Ciao,
Dscho