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Q: Ligatures in Programming Fonts? A: Hell No

posted by Fnord666 on Monday July 24 2017, @03:39AM   
from the not-no-but-... dept.

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Ligatures in programming fonts — a misguided trend I was hoping would collapse under its own illogic. But several readers have already sent me this new argument in favor.

Let me save you some time:

Ligatures in programming fonts are a terrible idea.

And not because I’m a purist or a grump. (Some days, but not today.) Programming code has special semantic considerations. Ligatures in programming fonts are likely to either misrepresent the meaning of the code, or cause miscues among readers. So in the end, even if they’re cute, the risk of error isn’t worth it.

There are good reasons we have Unicode and this is NOT one of them.

Source: http://tinyletter.com/mbutterick/letters/q-ligatures-in-programming-fonts-a-hell-no

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Original Submission

• elastic tabstops elastic tabstops (Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Monday July 24 2017, @06:29AM (4 children)

  by bzipitidoo (4388) on Monday July 24 2017, @06:29AM (#543584) Journal

  Okay, I'll take your post seriously. Interesting, but I don't see any advantage of elastic tabstops over HTML table cells.

  It's a very bad idea to redefine an ASCII control character that is still commonly used. Leave CR, LF, and Tab alone. And for good measure don't mess with Null, Esc, or backspace either.

  Parent

  Starting Score:	1		point
  Karma-Bonus Modifier		+1
  Total Score:		2

• Re:elastic tabstops (Score: 2, Informative) by anubi on Monday July 24 2017, @10:30AM

  by anubi (2828) on Monday July 24 2017, @10:30AM (#543627) Journal

  Good Lord!!!

  As if we weren't already having enough problems with alphabetic capital "O" looking a helluva lot like a numeric "0", and lower case alphabetic "l" looking like a numeric "1", we haven't had enough of this look-alike confusion?

  The only thing this looks good to me for is to enable one to more easily write obfuscated code that looks like it does one thing and actually does another.

  --
  "Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]

  Parent

• Re:elastic tabstops Re:elastic tabstops (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 24 2017, @02:30PM (2 children)

  by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 24 2017, @02:30PM (#543694)

  As if tab character had ever had a single agreed-upon definition.

  Parent

  • Re:elastic tabstops (Score: 1) by Arik on Monday July 24 2017, @07:14PM

    by Arik (4543) on Monday July 24 2017, @07:14PM (#543844) Journal

    "As if tab character had ever had a single agreed-upon definition."
    
    TAB - Advance to the next tab stop.
    
    TABs had a single agreed-upon definition from the start, it was the implementation of the tab stop that, in retrospect, might have been more tightly specified.

    --
    If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?

    Parent

  • Re:elastic tabstops (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 24 2017, @07:16PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 24 2017, @07:16PM (#543846)

    A tab character is like a dick, the size may vary but it's still a dick.

    Parent