Re: non-breaking hyphens

[Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>]

>>> I'm not sure I understand the goal of `nobreak-char-display'.  Is it for
>>> warning the user when there is an ASCII look-alike character that isn't
>>> really ASCII?  I guess that's mainly to avoid issues with source code?
>> Yes, probably.  But I'm only guessing here.  Can you find any traces
>> of discussing this in the archives?

I do remember it being the result (through various discussions, as you
can imagine) of bug reports where a NBSP was accidentally inserted in
source code instead of a SPC, which can be difficult to track down.

> The right way to implement this feature, as brought up in the 2004
> thread, would be to specify the affected characters with a char-table
> rather than hardcoding them.  But we should probably leave such a change
> till after 24.1.

I believe the general solution is along the lines of what the GNU ELPA
packae "markchars" does.  The current solution was a simple solution for
the sub-cases that can happen commonly in programming languages.

The reason why it's important to handle programming languages is that
visual similarity is not understood by compilers ;-)
In contrast for text buffers (or even LaTeX and HTML), it's much
less problematic.

Also the significant cases are the ones where the similarity is between
a "plain ASCII" char and some other one.


        Stefan