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[Gene Heskett]

On Tuesday 17 February 2009, Tim wrote:
>Steve Searle:
>>> The max-lease-time does not contain dashes but some sort of double
>>> length dash.
>
>Gene Heskett:
>> Which is not available on USian keyboards.  WTH?
>
>In this case it was a unicode minus sign (a mathematics symbol, not a
>hyphen dash).
>
>There are lots of characters that can be used that don't have a way of
>being directly typed, so the keyboard's not really an issue.  They can
>be typed using key combinations, or the author could have used a program
>that replaces hyphens with dashes, under some circumstances:  Generally
>it's done fairly sensibly (not when you just type a dash, but when you
>type something like a double-dash sequence).  And this would normally be
>a *good* thing (using proper punctuation in documentation, in the right
>places).  But it should NOT be done in programming examples (the wrong
>thing in the wrong place), where someone might directly use what you've
>typed in a program.
>
>I've often seen that sort of thing on webpages, where some authoring
>help has /helpfully/ replaced computer quotes with proper quotes at the
>wrong moment (in code sample snippets).  It's a very good thing,
>normally, to write things correctly, and I strongly condemn the
>inappropriate use of computer quotes (and other poor substitute
>characters that look somewhat like what they're supposed to be, but
>simply are *not*) in prose as childishly lame typing.  But, likewise,
>I'll condemn the use of wrong punctuation in code samples.
>
>I've seen this sort of thing, often enough, that I'll try and avoid
>cutting and pasting code samples from webpages as much as possible.  Too
>many errors creep in.
>
>Someone will, no doubt, chime in and claim that crappy ASCII is good
>enough for everyone, we don't need no UTF, and "screw you" for wanting
>to do things right...  But I'll argue the case in an analogy that will
>definitely ring true for you, Gene:
>
>You wouldn't put a 50 ohm BNC plug on a cable that connects to a 75 ohm
>socket.  They look (almost) the same, but they're not.  *You* know why
>it's wrong, and you know it'll cause you some sort of problems, even
>when others who know nothing about them don't understand.
>
>(Says Tim, who's camera once kept going off air on a live broadcast, at
>the worst of times, because some dingbat had done just that.)

Of course Tim, we have all paid our dues to the tender bit of fsckup.  What's 
worse is that if you do that to an N connector, the 50 ohm pin is big enough 
to plumb break the petals off the 75 ohm female.  Plays holy, unmitigated 
hell with the vswr when the broken petal parts short it out too.  And that 
was what I believed to have been factory installed connectors in a TT-52 UHF 
GE transmitter, all examples of which have been recycled by now.  That one 
was Wayne County Public Powers biggest customer in Wayne Co. NE back in the 
70's.

-- 
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
Anarchy may not be a better form of government, but it's better than no
government at all.