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* David Cantrell <david@xxxxxxxx.xxx.xx> [2006-10-29 14:10]: > No, that was a backslash, a three, a two, and a seven. Please > try again. If you disagree, then consider my usual invitation > to the Unicodistas to be extended - I'll take you seriously > once you've configured all my machines and all my applications > to display your foolishness properly. Here's a nickel, get yourself some technology from this decade. The only hurdle I had to overcome was recompile a single package with*out* a non-default switch added to work around bugs in the UTF-8 support of old libraries, ironically enough. Nothing other than adding `charset=utf-8` in local lingo to a few config files was necessary beyond that. Or don't bother. Monolinguals can afford to stay blithely ignorant of any progress in the state of affairs. > Additionally, from looking at a unicode table, that character > is visually indistinguishable from the letter x. If one can > not tell the difference between this ... > > A=x*y; > > and this ... > > A=xxy; # is that x times y, or x squared times y, or the variable xxy? > > then you are, to put it bluntly, fucked. Here's a nickel, find a font that doesn't suck. > > It would be nice if someday using a computer didn't mean > > suffering bad typography. > > It doesn't right now. TeX and LaTeX have existed for ages. You are hereby cordially invited to use LaTeX as the display engine for your next GUI project. > There is, however, a fairly fundamental difference between > documents intended for a wide non-technical audience and code. > With the former it is worth putting in a little effort to make > it look pretty, because the hoi-polloi think that's important. Whereas a coder like you is too hardcore for such concepts as "easy on the eye." That's for those who don't know what *really* matters. Real programmers thrive on ugliness. > For code, what matters is clarity, ease of production and ease > of maintenance. KISS applies just as much to your file format > as to your algorithms. My editor would suddenly get harder to use if the text were more legible? What? > > In fact, not even monospace fonts are necessarily sacred. > > They are currently necessary if you want to align blocks of > > text across multiple lines, but that could easily be achieved > > with proportional fonts by employing a scheme similar to > > elastic tabstops > > (<http://nickgravgaard.com/elastictabstops/>;). I'm not sure > > this can be implemented well without knowledge of the > > document format, though, so it might not be feasible in > > a generic editor. > > And given that yer average programmer works with several > languages, having one generic editor is a Very Good Thing. When the obvious is important, it can bear to be restated. Yours truly, -- Aristotle Pagaltzis // <http://plasmasturm.org/>;There's stuff above here
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