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

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


Original Submission

 
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  • (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]
    Starting Score:    1  point
    Moderation   +1  
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    Total Score:   2