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On 09/07/2018 22:06, Sean Conner wrote:
Well, it's a nice and smart trick, but I'm in the camp of "If I see a space, I want to know it's a space (0x20)".It was thus said that the Great Albert Chan once stated:BTW, non-breaking "fake" space in filename is a bad idea. http://boston.conman.org/2018/02/28.2What's bad about it? -spc (Or are you in the "no spaces in filename" camp?)
Moreover it is not ASCII, and I tend to avoid non-ASCII names. I work mainly on Windows, which doesn't support UTF-8 natively the way Linux does. So handling characters outside the ASCII set may be a nightmare.
BTW, try handling such a file to someone (especially a non-programmer) who is unaware and see the puzzlement in his eyes when he cannot understand why he cannot delete "my invoice.pdf" using the command line or why he sees "my invoice.pdf" and "my invoice.pdf" in the same directory!!!
If you want to be very evil, put /two/ spaces between words, where the first is ASCII 0x20 and the second is char 160!
Moreover, I've the gut feeling that there are plenty of badly-written Windows programs/scripts that will choke on char 160 when some code-page is set differently than the way the programmer has assumed.
Yes, underscore is not nice to see, but at least I see exactly what character is that (well, in ASCII at least. I'm sure there is some obscure UNICODE code point that is almost identical to an underscore and that will appear identical in some font!)
Unicode is great for typesetting (I use regularly LaTeX and it's fun to find almost every symbol you may imagine, even ancient German runic scripts!), but it sucks (IMHO) for general programming or computer-related stuff. Too much mind overhead to use correctly for little gain.
<disclaimer>I know my view is a bit "western-centric" (or "latin-centrinc") and people speaking languages who need thousands of symbols to be written might think differently (especially Asian languages).
Anyway I'm curious to know how, say, Chinese programmers view the thing.Would they find coding more "easy" if they could write programs using ideograms or do they think using transliteration of their words in a Latin alphabet.
BTW, I code religiously "in English" (even comments), and I teach my students to try to do so, but I understand that sometimes this requires higher English skills than many programmers have.
</disclaimer>On a related note: sometimes I've dreamt of having an universally *standardized* "extended ASCII" charset for programming, without all the human-language-related stuff of unicode. A 16 bit "universal" charset should be big enough to accomodate any symbol useful in programming (e.g. common math operators and symbols, greek letters, currency symbols), but I'm digressing. :-)
Cheers! -- Lorenzo