From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Edward Cree Date: Mon, 10 May 2021 14:16:16 +0100 Subject: [Intel-wired-lan] [PATCH 00/53] Get rid of UTF-8 chars that can be mapped as ASCII In-Reply-To: <20210510135518.305cc03d@coco.lan> References: <2ae366fdff4bd5910a2270823e8da70521c859af.camel@infradead.org> <20210510135518.305cc03d@coco.lan> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit To: intel-wired-lan@osuosl.org List-ID: On 10/05/2021 12:55, Mauro Carvalho Chehab wrote: > The main point on this series is to replace just the occurrences > where ASCII represents the symbol equally well > - U+2014 ('?'): EM DASH Em dash is not the same thing as hyphen-minus, and the latter does not serve 'equally well'. People use em dashes because ? even in monospace fonts ? they make text easier to read and comprehend, when used correctly. I accept that some of the other distinctions ? like en dashes ? are needlessly pedantic (though I don't doubt there is someone out there who will gladly defend them with the same fervour with which I argue for the em dash) and I wouldn't take the trouble to use them myself; but I think there is a reasonable assumption that when someone goes to the effort of using a Unicode punctuation mark that is semantic (rather than merely typographical), they probably had a reason for doing so. > - U+2018 ('?'): LEFT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK > - U+2019 ('?'): RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK > - U+201c ('?'): LEFT DOUBLE QUOTATION MARK > - U+201d ('?'): RIGHT DOUBLE QUOTATION MARK (These are purely typographic, I have no problem with dumping them.) > - U+00d7 ('?'): MULTIPLICATION SIGN Presumably this is appearing in mathematical formulae, in which case changing it to 'x' loses semantic information. > Using the above symbols will just trick tools like grep for no good > reason. NBSP, sure. That one's probably an artefact of some document format conversion somewhere along the line, anyway. But what kinds of things with ? or ? in are going to be grept for? If there are em dashes lying around that semantically _should_ be hyphen-minus (one of your patches I've seen, for instance, fixes an *en* dash moonlighting as the option character in an `ethtool` command line), then sure, convert them. But any time someone is using a Unicode character to *express semantics*, even if you happen to think the semantic distinction involved is a pedantic or unimportant one, I think you need an explicit grep case to justify ASCIIfying it. -ed