> My thinking is that they are perfectly proper English characters on > their own right and that the world of electronic publishing will become > much nicer and simpler once we have them everywhere in plaintext and on > keyboards. You shouldn't let the historic compromises made during the > design of ASCII (when daisywheel and golfball printers were definining > the state of the art) influence your views of what repertoire of > characters is needed to encode English plain text.
Personnaly, from my own POV, all the different variations of DASH and QUOTE are holdovers from the lead-block days of typesetting when publishers wanted to make the printed page lok more spiffy. Lets not undo the advances of the recent age when many of the indistinguishables were united into a simpler character set. > I'm also mildly looking forward to the use of non-ASCII charcaters in > programming languages. HYPHEN can occur in symbol names (currently > people use underscore as an ugly substitute, and got so used to the > looks_of_it that they don't even recognize it as an ugly hack any more). > MINUS separates variables in numeric expressions. Directional quotation > marks would provide welcome new ways of delimiting and nesting e.g. > string expressions. As a programmer, I always thought of underscore as representing a space, not a dash. Also, I hate similiar looking characters in code, so I avoid fonts where "1" and "l" look similiar, or "0" and "O" arent easily distinguished. What an ungodly nightmare if I had 4 types of dash and 12 types of quotes. (What I wouldnt mind are things like a real right arrow character to substiture for "->", or the ability to use Kanji in my identifiers.) Anyways, the only thing I would change about the US English keyboard would be to rearrange the keys into dvorak layout, drop scroll lock, move escape closer to my fingers, and get rid of all the windows keys. -- Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/
