From jttkim at googlemail.com  Fri Dec 12 20:39:21 2014
From: jttkim at googlemail.com (Jan Kim)
Date: Fri, 12 Dec 2014 19:39:21 +0000
Subject: [Rd] SUGGESTION: Force install.packages() to use ASCII encoding
 when parse():ing code?
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On Fri, Dec 12, 2014 at 04:58:52PM +0000, Barry Rowlingson wrote:
> On Fri, Dec 12, 2014 at 12:34 PM, Jan Kim <jttkim at googlemail.com> wrote:
> 
> > it's just a matter of time that people get characters into their code that
> > are different but indistinguishable in the font they use (I've seen this
> > with \H{o} rather than a \"{o}), and mega-personmonths are wasted puzzling
> > over tracking down these problems.
> 
>  Then R should ban variable names from having 'l', 'i', '1', '0' and
> 'O' in them!

well -- I can live with 'i', but if I came across code using variable names
i, \'{\i}, \`{\i} and also \i, \u{\i}, \r{\i}, \d{\i} etc. I'd consider that
dangerous to my sanity (especially if they're all used in the same piece of
code)...  ;-)

More seriously, as I (literally) see it, the problems of confusing l / I / 1
or O / 0 etc. are reasonably solvable by using a decent font (e.g. Deja Vu,
Source Code Pro), but ensuring distinctness of glyphs in the same way
won't scale to character sets the size of Unicode.

Best regards, Jan

> Barry
> 
> ______________________________________________
> R-devel at r-project.org mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel

-- 
 +- Jan T. Kim -------------------------------------------------------+
 |             email: jttkim at gmail.com                                |
 |             WWW:   http://www.jtkim.dreamhosters.com/              |
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[Rd] SUGGESTION: Force install.packages() to use ASCII encoding when parse():ing code?
Jan Kim