Unprintable characters

[John Darrington <jmd@gnu.org>]

On Sat, Jul 05, 2014 at 09:33:05PM +0200, Ludovic Court??s wrote:

> PS: Your MUA seems to have troubles quoting non-ASCII text.

I'm glad you raised that issue.

I would prefer it if we could avoid the gratiutous use of non-ascii characters.
Although they can be handles in GNU/Linux, it is troublesome.

For  example doing a simple

 less gnu/packages/maths.scm

provokes the response:

 "gnu/packages/maths.scm" may be a binary file.  See it anyway?

And then the header is displayed as:

;;; Copyright <C2><A9> 2013, 2014 Andreas Enge <andreas@enge.fr>
;;; Copyright <C2><A9> 2013 Nikita Karetnikov <nikita@karetnikov.org>
;;; Copyright <C2><A9> 2014 John Darrington <jmd@gnu.org>
;;; Copyright <C2><A9> 2014 Eric Bavier <bavier@member.fsf.org>

Is it really necessary to use a UTF-8 char here?   ok it looks nice when everything works,
but terrible in the other 90% of situations.

The same goes for quotes  " is a perfectly acceptable character instead of things
that rarely display properly.

The GNU Coding standards say:

  "Sticking to the ASCII character set (plain text, 7-bit characters) is 
   preferred in GNU source code comments, text documents, and other contexts, 
   unless there is good reason to do something else because of the application 
   domain."

I don't see that such reason exists in here.


J'