Re: Bug#428536: [Lynx-dev] problem on an ISO-8859-1 terminal

[Vincent Lefevre]

On 2007-06-13 16:21:59 +0900, Atsuhito Kohda wrote:
> On Tue, 12 Jun 2007 19:42:57 -0400 (EDT), Thomas Dickey wrote:
> > That's the way it is defined in
> > 
> > src/chrtrans/def7_uni.tbl:1554:U+2212: -
> > 
> > (a check of the history shows me it's been that definition at least ten 
> > years ;-)
> 
> Ummmm, okay, I see.  So this is an intended behavior.

Is it really an intended behavior or just a typo that just hasn't been
noticed so far?

> > My impression is that it was chosen to be visually distinct from a plain 
> > "-", but that it could be modified to make it less distinct...
> 
> So the intention is to distinguish the minus sign from 
> the hyphen, am I right?

Wait... with the above choice, how do you distinguish the minus sign
from a space followed by an hyphen?

> I'm afraid it is difficult to visually distinguish them on a text
> terminal.

Yes, if the goal was really to distinguish them, then a space should
have also been added in UTF-8. Now, this isn't even specific to text
terminals: it is difficult to distinguish the minus sign from the en
or em dash in a graphical browser as well.

I think that there shouldn't be a need to distinguish them: the
context should be sufficient to make the difference (this is also
true for other characters that look the same). The space is even
worse, e.g. if one writes a sequence of expressions separated by
spaces: 0+1 2-1 3 4+5...

-- 
Vincent Lefèvre <address@hidden> - Web: <http://www.vinc17.org/>
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Work: CR INRIA - computer arithmetic / Arenaire project (LIP, ENS-Lyon)