From: Linus Torvalds Date: Tue, 13 Nov 2012 19:50:15 GMT Subject: Re: [PATCH nd/wildmatch] Correct Git's version of isprint and isspace Message-ID: In-Reply-To: On Tue, Nov 13, 2012 at 11:40 AM, Linus Torvalds wrote: > > I have to wonder why you care? As far as I'm concerned, the only valid > space is space, TAB and CR/LF. > > Anything else is *noise*, not space. What's the reason for even caring? Btw, expanding the whitespace selection may actually be very counter-productive. It is used primarily for things like removing extraneous space at the end of lines etc, and for that, the current selection of SPACE, TAB and LF/CR is the right thing to do. Adding things like FF etc - that are *technically* whitespace, but aren't the normal kind of silent whitespace - is potentially going to change things too much. People might *want* a form-feed in their messages, for all we know. So I really object to changing things "just because". There's a reason we do our own ctype.c: it avoids the crazy crap. It avoids the idiotic localization issues, and it avoids the ambiguous cases. So just let it be, unless you have some major real reason to actually care about a real-world case. And if you do, please explain it. Don't change things just because. Linus