Re: [PATCH 00/53] Get rid of UTF-8 chars that can be mapped as ASCII

Edward Cree
2021-05-10T13:18:28Z

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