Re: [PATCH] stripspace: Call U+0020 a "space" instead of a "blank"

Stefan Beller [off-list ref] writes:

On Tue, Feb 9, 2016 at 2:24 PM, Junio C Hamano [off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

Alex Henrie [off-list ref] writes:

quoted

I couldn't find any other examples of people referring to this character
as a "blank".

Signed-off-by: Alex Henrie <redacted>
---

Any comments on this from anybody other than the author that I
missed to support this change?

I remember "blank" being used in my early days of computing.

The blank was somehow more accurate as it described the exact
thing (i.e. char U+0020 as commonly produced via the space bar
on the key board)

A space however could refer to any kind of indentation.
 * tabs would qualify for that
 * other tricks of your (wordprocessor-) editor would qualify for that
   (indent by 2 inches in footer section or other weeirdness)
 * any other character not using any ink in a printer[1]

[1] https://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/chars/spaces.html

Looking at that table in there, U+0020 is officially called "space",
so I guess the patch is technically correct.

So the "blank" is correct because we just want a gap between the
comment char and the text, and use of " " is merely an
implementation detail.  The "space" is correct because that happens
to be the byte used as the implementation detail of leaving that gap
between the comment char and the text.

;-)

Orthogonal to this discussion, I'd suggest adding an "a"
into the string

     N_("prepend a comment character and a {space, blank} to each line"),

quoted

quoted

 builtin/stripspace.c | 2 +-
 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-)

diff --git a/builtin/stripspace.c b/builtin/stripspace.c
index 7ff8434..15e716e 100644
--- a/builtin/stripspace.c
+++ b/builtin/stripspace.c

@@ -35,7 +35,7 @@ int cmd_stripspace(int argc, const char **argv, const char *prefix)
                          N_("skip and remove all lines starting with comment character"),
                          STRIP_COMMENTS),
              OPT_CMDMODE('c', "comment-lines", &mode,
-                         N_("prepend comment character and blank to each line"),
+                         N_("prepend comment character and space to each line"),
                          COMMENT_LINES),
              OPT_END()
      };

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2016-02-09 16:00 GMT-07:00 Junio C Hamano [off-list ref]:

Stefan Beller [off-list ref] writes:

quoted

On Tue, Feb 9, 2016 at 2:24 PM, Junio C Hamano [off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

Alex Henrie [off-list ref] writes:

quoted

I couldn't find any other examples of people referring to this character
as a "blank".

Signed-off-by: Alex Henrie <redacted>
---

Any comments on this from anybody other than the author that I
missed to support this change?

I remember "blank" being used in my early days of computing.

The blank was somehow more accurate as it described the exact
thing (i.e. char U+0020 as commonly produced via the space bar
on the key board)

A space however could refer to any kind of indentation.
 * tabs would qualify for that
 * other tricks of your (wordprocessor-) editor would qualify for that
   (indent by 2 inches in footer section or other weeirdness)
 * any other character not using any ink in a printer[1]

[1] https://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/chars/spaces.html

Looking at that table in there, U+0020 is officially called "space",
so I guess the patch is technically correct.

So the "blank" is correct because we just want a gap between the
comment char and the text, and use of " " is merely an
implementation detail.  The "space" is correct because that happens
to be the byte used as the implementation detail of leaving that gap
between the comment char and the text.

;-)

"blank" does not sound like good English to me, but there are a lot of
dialects of English, so I can understand if it sounds natural to
someone else.

-Alex