4 ms·

"This is like the 21st century version of confusing a zero with a capital letter O, yet worse." I like the analogy, but why is it worse?

sparky_z 5y ago
The confusion between between a zero and an O would only happen to a human. The software would always consider them fully separate characters, would never, for example, silently convert all the zeros to O's during a copy-paste operation. Also, zero-O confusion can be remedied by simply choosing the right font. But by definition, different types of spaces all have to look exactly the same when rendered as text. To inspect and diagnose the problem, you have to switch to a different form of character representation, like hex or Unicode code points.
- SiempreViernes 5y ago
  > But by definition, different types of spaces all have to look exactly the same The article is in fact about a case where this didn't happen, and in general it seems weird to insist that different spaces must look the same.
  - tempodox 5y ago
    Except for ` `, where the point is to look the same but behave differently.
- msl 5y ago
  > But by definition, different types of spaces all have to look exactly the same when rendered as text. Only in the sense that they look like nothing at all. They can, however differ in how much nothingness they represent [1] which I would argue can make them look quite different one another. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitespace_character#Unicode https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitespace_character#Unicode (Feel free to ignore tabs, line breaks and other characters that don't feel space-y enough. There should still be plenty left to choose from.)
- alister 5y ago
  > The confusion between between a zero and an O would only happen to a human It happens to a computer doing optical character recognition (OCR) on a scanned document. Or a machine vision system reading street signs or other text.

sparky_z 5y ago

The confusion between between a zero and an O would only happen to a human. The software would always consider them fully separate characters, would never, for example, silently convert all the zeros to O's during a copy-paste operation. Also, zero-O confusion can be remedied by simply choosing the right font. But by definition, different types of spaces all have to look exactly the same when rendered as text. To inspect and diagnose the problem, you have to switch to a different form of character representation, like hex or Unicode code points.

SiempreViernes 5y ago
> But by definition, different types of spaces all have to look exactly the same The article is in fact about a case where this didn't happen, and in general it seems weird to insist that different spaces must look the same.
- tempodox 5y ago
  Except for ` `, where the point is to look the same but behave differently.
msl 5y ago
> But by definition, different types of spaces all have to look exactly the same when rendered as text. Only in the sense that they look like nothing at all. They can, however differ in how much nothingness they represent [1] which I would argue can make them look quite different one another. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitespace_character#Unicode https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitespace_character#Unicode (Feel free to ignore tabs, line breaks and other characters that don't feel space-y enough. There should still be plenty left to choose from.)
alister 5y ago
> The confusion between between a zero and an O would only happen to a human It happens to a computer doing optical character recognition (OCR) on a scanned document. Or a machine vision system reading street signs or other text.