Re: Unprintable characters

[ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès)]

John Darrington <jmd@gnu.org> skribis:

> 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.

Not in 2014, no.

> 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?

That’s most likely because ‘less’ isn’t invoked with a UTF-8 locale.
Try doing, say: LC_ALL=en_US.utf8 less maths.scm.

It may be the same problem that affects the MUA.

> 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."

When I have spare time and energy for that, I’ll happily submit a
patch.  :-)

GNU standardized native language support, presumably because it makes
the freedom to use the program practical for a wider range of people.
For the same reason, time has come to say goodbye to ASCII.

Thanks,
Ludo’.