Re: Zero Width Space

[Alejandro Colomar]

Hi Ingo,

On 6/5/22 14:31, Ingo Schwarze wrote:
> > - “no-op escape”
>
> But this one, or a variation thereof, might perhaps sever the knot.
> It avoids both the very misleading terminology "input break"
> and the confusion with the Unicode "ZERO WIDTH SPACE", and it
> very accurately describes what this escape sequence does: nothing.
> It is usually not inserted for some effect it might have but
> merely to prevent an adjacent punctuation character from being
> the first character on an input line, the last character before
> an input ASCII space or tab character, or the last character on
> an input line.  Even when used to disable kerning (which i would
> expect to be rare, in particular compared to the other use cases),
> thinking along the lines of "let's have a no-op instead of kerning"
> or "let's insert a no-op because there will be no kerning between
> the adjacent characters and a no-op" would make sense to me.

Let me comment on this one as a non-expert groff user here.
"no-op escape" makes a lot of sense in cases like

    \&. This line contains a leading '.'

Because it does literally nothing, and prevents having . as the first 
thing.  If this were the only place it can be used, I'd say this name is 
perfect, and better than "non-printing input break" (NPIB).

BUT, it doesn't make any sense to me here:

    .B foo\&
    bar

If that were a no-op, I wouldn't write it (why would I write something 
that does nothing???).  What I want here is something that really has an 
operation: join input lines.

Considering an overall of the situations where this escape is useful, I 
think NPIB makes more sense to me.


> I still think that "zero-width non-breaking space" would work, too,
> because it's also accurate, avoids the very wrong words "input break",
> and does not cause confusion in relation to Unicode.  But your
> suggestion has the advantage of being shorter and easier to understand.

A merge of terms came to my mind just now, which may make sense to you:

How about "non-breaking escape" or "non-printing escape" (not 
necessarily in that order of preference)?


Cheers,

Alex

--
Alejandro Colomar
<http://www.alejandro-colomar.es/>