Hi Branden, On 4/17/23 23:10, G. Branden Robinson wrote: > Hi Alex, > > At 2023-04-17T20:14:42+0200, Alejandro Colomar wrote: >> What do standards say about formatting dates? > > Nothing that I know of. > >> Do they specify the character? > > Not that I know of. > >> I read some RFCs, but didn't see it specified, other than calling it >> literally '"-"'. No name of the character, or ASCII code. > > Most RFCs don't concern themselves with typography. :) > >> However, date(1) only accepts hyphen-minus, so it would be nice to use >> a compatible format, even if standards didn't mandate it. > > Sure, and for an example you actually intend someone to copy and paste, > you should _typeset it as an example_. > > In my opinion, the cases at issue weren't examples of things to be > copied and pasted, but _read_. That is why I attempted to point out a > much easier way of getting date(1) to format the Epoch. > > As another example, in the history section of a man page, I might say > something like the following. > > This system call appeared in First Edition Unix, 1971-11-03. > > It would be silly, in my opinion, to escape these hyphens. They're not > intended as command parameters, but for the enlightenment of the reader. > > I concede that there are people who don't _ever_ want to see proper > hyphens in UTF-8 man pages. For them, _every_ hyphen should be a > hyphen-minus. I don't agree, but groff man(7) can accommodate their > desires. That is why groff has the following in its "PROBLEMS" file. You know I'm not one of those ;) > > ---snip--- [...] > ---end snip--- > > By analogy, we don't compose man pages to write "don\[aq]t", even if for > some reason a person might want to type "don't" as input to a Unix > command. (I hope they've prepared for its potential interaction with > the shell's quoting mechanisms.) People have gradually realized over > the years that typing "don\[aq]t" is derpy and awkward. Typesetting > enthusiasts also note that it gives you a wrongly-shaped apostrophe in > DVI, PostScript, and PDF output. I'm not convinced, because dates are not prose. Why should we use hyphens in dates formatted with standards-like formats? I would agree in using hyphens in dates if we spelled out dates unformatted, in plain English. But if we use ISO-like or RFC-like formats, I think we should adhere to them completely. > >> I'll hold the patch, to allow for some discussion, but I want to apply >> it. > > I unflinchingly agree with the remainder of the patch. I simply want to > caution against a robotic process of demoting perfectly legitimate > hyphens to the crudely compromised hyphen-minus character. Please explain why they are reasonable there? What's the use of a hyphen in a date? It's not a compound noun, or something like that. Cheers, Alex > > Regards, > Branden -- <http://www.alejandro-colomar.es/> GPG key fingerprint: A9348594CE31283A826FBDD8D57633D441E25BB5
Attachment:
OpenPGP_signature
Description: OpenPGP digital signature
