Eric Lavarde writes, > in some man pages ... the dashes and single quotes are > not really what they look like, but some other unicode > letter. This has two major drawbacks: > - search for options become nearly impossible > ...
You illustrate well the fundamental problem with indiscriminate use of a very large character set like Unicode. If people want to use Unicode, this is fine; Unicode and utf-8 exist to be used, after all. However, restricted character sets (mainly ascii and Latin-1) offer several real practical benefits that Unicode can never provide. One such benefit is that dashes and single quotes are usually what they appear to be. Comprehensiveness is important, and Unicode is nothing if not comprehensive. On the other hand, simplicity is a prime aesthetic, which Unicode lacks. -- Thaddeus H. Black 508 Nellie's Cave Road Blacksburg, Virginia 24060, USA +1 540 961 0920, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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