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Thank you Mouse for your response and a suggestion of making
possible narrow alternatives to `=`available in Lua.
By the way, out of the proposed ones I would personally prefer ":"
because of resemblance with musical notation where [:[ ]:]
looks a bit like 𝄆 𝄇 and gives a well known pattern for
delimiting a block of notation.
What comes to my mind about the by you mentioned issue with
proportional and also monospaced fonts is that you are right ...
most don't care about clear difference between ambiguous letters.
As this problem can in aviation lead to severe issues, there is a
font which tries to provide a solution:
`--[[[[[ third level styled text comment ]]]]]`[...] That said, '=' is as good as any other character that cannot follow '[' in regular Lua code. (Better yet if it cannot come before ']').Well, the original text specifically wrote of "leav[ing] [] in my eyes ugly and overlong monospaced texts [...] to embrace variable width fonts". From that point of view, = is _not_ "as good as any other character", because it is typically a relatively wide character in non-monospaced fonts. Thinking of characters that are typically narrow, what come to mind offhand are !, |, `, :, plus others (eg ¦) if you're willing to consider non-ASCII characters. Maybe one of them could be pressed into service. Of course, one could also take the stance that such problems are artifically created by insisting on non-monospaced fonts; personally, I find non-monospaced fonts significantly more ambiguous and therefore unusable for tasks requiring programming-level precision. (I would expect, for example, to have little to no visual distinction between I and l. Even the monospaced font I'm using for this mail has only one pixel different between them.) /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B