From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Path: news.gmane.org!not-for-mail From: Matthew Carter Newsgroups: gmane.emacs.devel Subject: Re: Upcoming loss of usability of Emacs source files and Emacs. Date: Tue, 23 Jun 2015 16:42:01 -0400 Organization: Ahungry (http://ahungry.com) Message-ID: <87bng65f8m.fsf@ahungry.com> References: <87si9qonxb.fsf@gnu.org> <5581C29E.1030101@yandex.ru> <87r3p9fxm2.fsf@uwakimon.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp> <87k2v0fiji.fsf@uwakimon.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp> <20150619090225.GA2743@acm.fritz.box> <87fv5kfrfa.fsf@uwakimon.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp> <83twtzhi9g.fsf@gnu.org> <877fqvfvby.fsf@uwakimon.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp> <83fv5jh8ls.fsf@gnu.org> <874mlzf71d.fsf@uwakimon.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp> <558945C2.2010203@yandex.ru> <831th2h1m3.fsf@gnu.org> <83lhfaff0f.fsf@gnu.org> <83ioaefcy8.fsf@gnu.org> <878ubagod3.fsf@mbork.pl> NNTP-Posting-Host: plane.gmane.org Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable X-Trace: ger.gmane.org 1435092149 10255 80.91.229.3 (23 Jun 2015 20:42:29 GMT) X-Complaints-To: usenet@ger.gmane.org NNTP-Posting-Date: Tue, 23 Jun 2015 20:42:29 +0000 (UTC) Cc: eggert@cs.ucla.edu, rms@gnu.org, emacs-devel@gnu.org, dgutov@yandex.ru, acm@muc.de, Nikolai Weibull , stephen@xemacs.org To: Marcin Borkowski Original-X-From: emacs-devel-bounces+ged-emacs-devel=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Tue Jun 23 22:42:18 2015 Return-path: Envelope-to: ged-emacs-devel@m.gmane.org Original-Received: from lists.gnu.org ([208.118.235.17]) by plane.gmane.org with esmtp (Exim 4.69) (envelope-from ) id 1Z7V1L-0007bx-1n for ged-emacs-devel@m.gmane.org; Tue, 23 Jun 2015 22:42:15 +0200 Original-Received: from localhost ([::1]:47363 helo=lists.gnu.org) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1Z7V1K-0001QB-Ge for ged-emacs-devel@m.gmane.org; Tue, 23 Jun 2015 16:42:14 -0400 Original-Received: from eggs.gnu.org ([2001:4830:134:3::10]:51400) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1Z7V1F-0001PG-P9 for emacs-devel@gnu.org; Tue, 23 Jun 2015 16:42:11 -0400 Original-Received: from Debian-exim by eggs.gnu.org with spam-scanned (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1Z7V1B-0004ME-M2 for emacs-devel@gnu.org; Tue, 23 Jun 2015 16:42:09 -0400 Original-Received: from li130-200.members.linode.com ([69.164.215.200]:49242 helo=mail.ahungry.com) by eggs.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1Z7V1B-0004Lp-II; Tue, 23 Jun 2015 16:42:05 -0400 Original-Received: from Prometheus (99-40-9-245.lightspeed.livnmi.sbcglobal.net [99.40.9.245]) by mail.ahungry.com (Postfix) with ESMTPSA id 9B2A451E5; Tue, 23 Jun 2015 16:42:02 -0400 (EDT) In-Reply-To: <878ubagod3.fsf@mbork.pl> (Marcin Borkowski's message of "Tue, 23 Jun 2015 22:29:27 +0200") User-Agent: Gnus/5.13 (Gnus v5.13) Emacs/24.5 (gnu/linux) X-detected-operating-system: by eggs.gnu.org: GNU/Linux 2.2.x-3.x [generic] X-Received-From: 69.164.215.200 X-BeenThere: emacs-devel@gnu.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.14 Precedence: list List-Id: "Emacs development discussions." List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Errors-To: emacs-devel-bounces+ged-emacs-devel=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Original-Sender: emacs-devel-bounces+ged-emacs-devel=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Xref: news.gmane.org gmane.emacs.devel:187450 Archived-At: Marcin Borkowski writes: > On 2015-06-23, at 21:21, Eli Zaretskii wrote: > >> They shouldn't be expected to be able to distinguish between >> confusingly similar, but subtly different characters. Let me give you >> a few examples: >> >> " >> =E2=80=9C >> =E2=80=9D >> =E2=80=9F >> =E3=80=9E >> =E3=80=9F >> =E2=80=9C >> =E2=80=9E > > 1. My personal opinion is: I prefer `...', but I could live with =E2=80= =98...=E2=80=99 > provided that the input and search problems will be solved in > a satisfactory way and that I could find a font which renders them > better than the default font in my Emacs (Ubuntu Mono), where the > Unicode quotes look terrible. (I guess that when I finally get rid of > this pile of crap which Ubuntu has become, it will get better > automatically...) > > 2. I would like to point out to all Unicode fanboys (no offence, please, > I'm also a fanboy, though definitely not of Unicode) that AFAIK (though > I can't find any source now) there is a bug in Unicode: U+201C should > really be split into two characters, "LEFT DOUBLE QUOTATION MARK" and > "GERMAN RIGHT DOUBLE QUOTATION MARK" (see > e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotation_mark#German_.28Germany_and_A= ustria.29). > While their shape is identical, their bounding boxes should be mirror > images of each other. > > So please don't tell me that Unicode "solves the problem of nice > quotes". It does, but at the same time it introduces problems of its > own. (A funny one: see http://unicodelookup.com/#math and try to guess > what happened to 0x1D455, or "mathematical italic small h". A stupid > one: U+FE18, with a typo in the name.) In fact, Unicode seems to be > fundamentally broken by design, since it identifies characters by > numbers instead of names. This basically excludes any language with an > infinite[1] alphabet. > > [1] "infinite" in a practical sense, not a theoretical one, of course. > It is closer to "potential infinity". I mean here a language where it > is legal to create new characters on the fly, when needed, provided they > are combined from some basic shapes according to the rules. > > Best, Having done a lot of web development work (where unicode and different character sets between databases, web clients etc.) have caused many headaches, I would hate to see something that should be kept to display formats (rendered markdown, LaTeX, .odt files) in my primarily ASCII=20 based terminal (emacs -nw mode). It increases the difficulty in working with the characters (I'd always prefer to type `...' than whatever is required to insert curlies) and it will break some web based tutorials/guides where the writer/blogger copies and pastes the unicode quotes out of some part of emacs and the web portion fails on it (similar to users copying and pasting curly quotes from Microsoft Word into various WYSIWYG editors). In my Common Lisp personal projects I love taking advantage of the non-ASCII character set that Common Lisp can use (=C6=92, =CE=BB, =CE=B1, = =CF=88 etc.), but I would never expect someone else to maintain or touch said codebase. --=20 Matthew Carter (m@ahungry.com) http://ahungry.com