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> Because the land of cli args is inconsequential compared in scale compared to the general world of computer use Not really true - the “general world of compu

> Because the land of cli args is inconsequential compared in scale compared to the general world of computer use Not really true - the “general world of computer use” uses that stuff very heavily, just “behind the scenes” so the average user isn’t aware of it. For example, it is very common for GUI apps to parse command line arguments at startup (since, e.g., one way the OS, and other apps which integrate with it, uses to get your word processor to open a particular document, is to pass the path to the document as a command line argument) > and banning spaces does not remove the complexity of escaping (how do you escape _?) You don’t need to escape _ unless it has some special meaning to the command processor/shell. On Unix it doesn’t. Nor for Windows cmd.exe

eviks 3y ago
> just “behind the scenes” That means they're not using it since they don't have to deal with spaces as spaces vs as separators > You don’t need to escape So how do you differentiate between a user inserting a space and a user inserting a literal _ in a file name?
- skissane 3y ago
  > That means they're not using it since they don't have to deal with spaces as spaces vs as separators The end-user isn't consciously using it. The software they are using is. We are talking here about programmer-visible reality, not end-user-visible reality. Those two realities don't have to be the same, as in the "replace spaces with underscores and vice versa" idea. > So how do you differentiate between a user inserting a space and a user inserting a literal _ in a file name? Underscores are rarely used by non-technical users. It isn't a standard punctuation mark. Back when people used typewriters, the average person was familiar with using them to underline things, but nowadays, the majority of the population are too young to have ever used one. I doubt many non-technical users would even notice if underscores in file names were (from their perspective) automatically converted to spaces, since they probably wouldn't put one in to begin with.
  - eviks 3y ago
    I'm talking about the general reality (that you keep ignoring) and pointing out that it's much bigger than the programmer-visible one. For example, the "not many" non-tech users who would notice the broken unescaped underscores is a bigger group than all the programmers given how much bigger the base group is. You're just fine breaking their workflows just because a small group of professionals can't fix their APIs

eviks 3y ago

> just “behind the scenes” That means they're not using it since they don't have to deal with spaces as spaces vs as separators > You don’t need to escape So how do you differentiate between a user inserting a space and a user inserting a literal _ in a file name?

skissane 3y ago
> That means they're not using it since they don't have to deal with spaces as spaces vs as separators The end-user isn't consciously using it. The software they are using is. We are talking here about programmer-visible reality, not end-user-visible reality. Those two realities don't have to be the same, as in the "replace spaces with underscores and vice versa" idea. > So how do you differentiate between a user inserting a space and a user inserting a literal _ in a file name? Underscores are rarely used by non-technical users. It isn't a standard punctuation mark. Back when people used typewriters, the average person was familiar with using them to underline things, but nowadays, the majority of the population are too young to have ever used one. I doubt many non-technical users would even notice if underscores in file names were (from their perspective) automatically converted to spaces, since they probably wouldn't put one in to begin with.
- eviks 3y ago
  I'm talking about the general reality (that you keep ignoring) and pointing out that it's much bigger than the programmer-visible one. For example, the "not many" non-tech users who would notice the broken unescaped underscores is a bigger group than all the programmers given how much bigger the base group is. You're just fine breaking their workflows just because a small group of professionals can't fix their APIs