On Mon, May 10, 2021 at 02:16:16PM +0100, Edward Cree wrote:
On 10/05/2021 12:55, Mauro Carvalho Chehab wrote:
The main point on this series is to replace just the occurrences where ASCII represents the symbol equally well
- U+2014 ('—'): EM DASH
Em dash is not the same thing as hyphen-minus, and the latter does not serve 'equally well'. People use em dashes because — even in monospace fonts — they make text easier to read and comprehend, when used correctly. I accept that some of the other distinctions — like en dashes — are needlessly pedantic (though I don't doubt there is someone out there who will gladly defend them with the same fervour with which I argue for the em dash) and I wouldn't take the trouble to use them myself; but I think there is a reasonable assumption that when someone goes to the effort of using a Unicode punctuation mark that is semantic (rather than merely typographical), they probably had a reason for doing so.
I think you're overestimating the amount of care and typographical knowledge that your average kernel developer has. Most of these UTF-8 characters come from latex conversions and really aren't necessary (and are being used incorrectly).
You seem quite knowedgeable about the various differences. Perhaps you'd be willing to write a document for Documentation/doc-guide/ that provides guidance for when to use which kinds of horizontal line? https://www.punctuationmatters.com/hyphen-dash-n-dash-and-m-dash/ talks about it in the context of publications, but I think we need something more suited to our needs for kernel documentation.