linux-kernel - Re: [PATCH 00/53] Get rid of UTF-8 chars that can be mapped as ASCII

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Date:   Mon, 10 May 2021 14:16:16 +0100
From:   Edward Cree <ecree.xilinx@...il.com>
To:     Mauro Carvalho Chehab <mchehab+huawei@...nel.org>,
        David Woodhouse <dwmw2@...radead.org>
Cc:     Linux Doc Mailing List <linux-doc@...r.kernel.org>,
        linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org, Jonathan Corbet <corbet@....net>,
        alsa-devel@...a-project.org, coresight@...ts.linaro.org,
        dri-devel@...ts.freedesktop.org, intel-gfx@...ts.freedesktop.org,
        intel-wired-lan@...ts.osuosl.org, keyrings@...r.kernel.org,
        kvm@...r.kernel.org, linux-acpi@...r.kernel.org,
        linux-arm-kernel@...ts.infradead.org, linux-edac@...r.kernel.org,
        linux-ext4@...r.kernel.org, linux-f2fs-devel@...ts.sourceforge.net,
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Subject: Re: [PATCH 00/53] Get rid of UTF-8 chars that can be mapped as ASCII

On 10/05/2021 12:55, Mauro Carvalho Chehab wrote:
> The main point on this series is to replace just the occurrences
> where ASCII represents the symbol equally well

> 	- U+2014 ('—'): EM DASH
Em dash is not the same thing as hyphen-minus, and the latter does not
 serve 'equally well'.  People use em dashes because — even in
 monospace fonts — they make text easier to read and comprehend, when
 used correctly.
I accept that some of the other distinctions — like en dashes — are
 needlessly pedantic (though I don't doubt there is someone out there
 who will gladly defend them with the same fervour with which I argue
 for the em dash) and I wouldn't take the trouble to use them myself;
 but I think there is a reasonable assumption that when someone goes
 to the effort of using a Unicode punctuation mark that is semantic
 (rather than merely typographical), they probably had a reason for
 doing so.

> 	- U+2018 ('‘'): LEFT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK
> 	- U+2019 ('’'): RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK
> 	- U+201c ('“'): LEFT DOUBLE QUOTATION MARK
> 	- U+201d ('”'): RIGHT DOUBLE QUOTATION MARK
(These are purely typographic, I have no problem with dumping them.)

> 	- U+00d7 ('×'): MULTIPLICATION SIGN
Presumably this is appearing in mathematical formulae, in which case
 changing it to 'x' loses semantic information.

> Using the above symbols will just trick tools like grep for no good
> reason.
NBSP, sure.  That one's probably an artefact of some document format
 conversion somewhere along the line, anyway.
But what kinds of things with × or — in are going to be grept for?

If there are em dashes lying around that semantically _should_ be
 hyphen-minus (one of your patches I've seen, for instance, fixes an
 *en* dash moonlighting as the option character in an `ethtool`
 command line), then sure, convert them.
But any time someone is using a Unicode character to *express
 semantics*, even if you happen to think the semantic distinction
 involved is a pedantic or unimportant one, I think you need an
 explicit grep case to justify ASCIIfying it.

-ed