Re: [PATCH] doc: fix 'git status --help' character quoting

From: Philip Oakley <philipoakley@iee.org>
Date: Oct 20, 2014, 10:46 UTC
Message-ID: <8D139BC1FB1E4335B4375FB0F056BB0B@PhilipOakley>
In-Reply-To: <xmqqwq7vr91j.fsf@gitster.dls.corp.google.com>

From: "Junio C Hamano" <gitster@pobox.com>

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> Philip Oakley <philipoakley@iee.org> writes:
>
>> Correct backtick quoting for some of the modification states to give
>> consistent web rendering.
>
> This is to match the way how "XY PATH1 -> PATH2" is typeset, I
> presume.  Some in the body text are already `XY` to match, but some
> others are not,
> and you are fixing them, all of which look good.

Do you need me to add this to the commit message?

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>
>> While at it, use 00 for ASCII NUL to avoid any confusion with the 
>> letter O.
>
> I do not think this is particularly a good change.  We try to follow
> the convention of spelling ASCII value in decimal (e.g. "ASCII
> double quote (34)"), and "00" is not the way how you usually spell a
> number in decimal.  Existing description is perfectly fine;

> there is
> no risk for anybody to mistake "O" (oh) as part of digits, whether
> you use decimal or hexadecimal.

The reason I proposed the change is because on the web view, on my machine, I questioned whether the specially formatted character (remember its quotation is consumed by ascidoc) looked too much like an Oh, so I specially checked on the original .txt to see if it was correct there, which led me to the proposal for '00' in this case.

I'd be just as happy with a single zero, as long as it's distinct from O (as you probably know, in the depths of hsitory typewriters didn't even have 0 and 1 keys - the O and l were used interchangably and many fonts keep too much to that pattern of undifferetiability!)

Note the more recent http://git-scm.com/docs/git-status has the formatted round o and https://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-status.html (which IIUC is out of date) has an unformatted 0.

Looking around some more, it's as if "0)" is special cased in some conversion to HTML.

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>
> If you have an aversion to mentioning ASCII when clarifying which
> character we talk about, you could of course do s/ASCII 0/'\0'/ but
> I do not know if that is an improvement.
>

-- Philip