On 28 April 2014 06:57, Ian Tuomi
On 27 Apr 2014, at 19:58, Rustom Mody wrote:
If you had the choice would you allow that f-i ligature to be thus confusable with the more normal fi? I probably wouldn't but nobody is asking us and the water that's flowed under the bridge cannot be 'flowed' backwards (to the best of my knowledge!)
In case that seems far-fetched consider the scenario: 1. Somebody loads (maybe innocently) the code involving variables like 'fine' into a 'ligature-happy 'IDE/editor' 2. The editor quietly changes all the fine to fine. 3. Since all those variables are in local scope nothing untoward is noticed 4. Until someone loads it into an 'old-fashioned' editor... and then...
I develop Hasklig, and have enjoyed the discussion about the pros and cons of ligatures in coding fonts. However, I really must protest this line of reasoning since it is based on false premises.
As an opentype feature, ligatures have nothing to do with the 'fi' and 'fl' unicode points, (which are legacy only, and heavily discouraged by the unicode consortium), or with unicode at all. The encoding of the file could be pure ASCII for all the ligatures care. The font used changes how the text looks, and nothing else.
When speaking of special unicode symbols in code, I agree with most objections raised against them :)
Ian, thanks for hasklig. My first thought when I saw it was that hopefully it would assuage the annoying promoters of unicode overreach. Conrad.