Are you saying that it is common that people use utf8 characters that you cannot easily type on a standard keyboard? I’m very skeptical of this claim.

Good to know that every time I feel the need to use ALGOL 68, I must remember to disable ligatures. Still not sure this is going to be a huge problem 😂

Well, that was something… I have used ligatures in my code editor for quite a few years now, and I have NEVER been confused about the ambiguity this person is so upset about. Why? I have never ever seen the Unicode character for not equals in a code block, simply since it is not a valid character in any known language. In fact, I have never even seen it in a String where it actually would be legal, probably since nobody knows how to type that using a standard keyboard. This whole article felt like someone with a severe diagnose have locked in on some hypothetical correctness issue, that simply isn’t a problem in the real world.

But, if you for some reason find ligatures confusing, then you shouldn’t use them. But, just to be clear, there is not a right of wrong like this blog post tries to argue, it is a matter of personal taste.

Splits, ligatures tabs and more

Cosmic term is nice. Still just alpha, so there are rough edges though.

The problem is that C is a prehistoric language and don’t have any of the complex types for example. So, in a modern language you create a String. That string will have a length, and some well defined properties (like encoding and such). With C you have a char * , which is just a pointer to the memory that contains bytes, and hopefully is null terminated. The null termination is defined, but not enforced. Any encoding is whatever the developer had in mind. So the compiler just don’t have the information to make any decisions. In rust you know exactly how long something lives, if something try to use it after that, the compiler can tell you. With C, all lifetimes lives in the developers head, and the compiler have no way of knowing. So, all these typing and properties of modern languages, are basically the implementation of your suggestion.

The problem with assassin the Russian economy, is to do it faster then it commit suicide.

My company actually used a whiteboard instead of a DNS for our internal network. We used it as a temp solution during setup, then 5 years later it was still in use. It worked quite well.