Re: Unicode confusables and reordering characters considered harmful, a simple solution

[Po Lu]

Gregory Heytings <gregory@heytings.org> writes:

>> Why do you need me to find an actual source code which uses those
>> controls?  Isn't it clear that any human-readable text in comments
>> and strings in a program's source code can and will use these
>> controls? How does the tutorial text that explains technical stuff
>> related to a computer program differ from what a programmer could
>> wish to write in a comment or a string in his/her program?

> From a theoretical point of view, that's correct.  From a practical
> point of view, if these controls characters are only found in 0.01% of
> the files that are hosted on, say, GitLab, and given that these
> controls can have a dangerous effect, it is reasonable for an editor
> to make them stand out. Just like Emacs makes no-break spaces stand
> out for example (although AFAIK they are not dangerous in any way),
> with a thin brown line.

I think the point that being made was that TUTORIAL.he demonstrates the
importance of these control characters in documents mixing characters of
different directionality, of which the Emacs tutorial is one, and source
code another.

And as such, that these characters are important for users who speak RTL
languages and wish to comment their code using those languages.

If it is ok for people to comment their code in Chinese, why make it
difficult for speakers of another important language, such as Hebrew or
Arabic?