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Ligatures in Programming Fonts: Hell No

practicaltypography.com

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Re: Ligatures in Programming Fonts: Hell No

#81

Post by ThJ »

C1sc0cat wrote: post #77
jon-wood wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ligatures in your editor don't change the underlying, code they just change the presentation of that code when you're viewing it. While a ligature supporting font may show you ≥, the underlying source file still contains the distinct characters >=

yes "up to a point lord copper". What what happens when this code is copy pasted, moved between machines in different countries or edited in multiple different editors you can get bizarre problems. Even moveing excel between countries gets some very strange changes Eg changing diacritical's but they look very very similar.

Absolutely nothing happens. Ligatures are a feature of fonts and font rendering engines. They do not affect the character codes. If you copy-paste from an editor configured with one of these fonts to an editor that isn't, you'll simply see the ordinary characters, because that's what was in memory the entire time.

Re: Ligatures in Programming Fonts: Hell No

#83

Post by msla »

jake-low wrote: post #10

Used judiciously, ligatures can help make code more readable, not less. Consider JavaScript's == and ===, and their inverses != and !==. I personally find them difficult to visually distinguish on occasion (especially the negative forms). Fira Code [0] replaces them with two-bar and three-bar equals signs (something like =, ≠, ≡, and ≢, only wider; see the link for a screenshot). I personally find these easier to dis…

The problem I have with ligatures in source code files is that it makes pairs of codepoints visually indistinguishable from a single codepoint.

For example, if I see "fl" in a string, is that "fl" or is it "fl"? That is, is it the codepoint sequence U+0066 U+006C turned into a ligated version visually, or is it U+FB02 the single codepoint?

Then I get paranoid: Did my text editor Helpfully convert the sequence of characters into the ligature character? The paranoia is probably unjustified, and would be seen as a bug if it weren't (probably), but a clear visual distinction would banish it entirely.

Re: Ligatures in Programming Fonts: Hell No

#84

Post by type0 »

atoav wrote: post #76
dmos62 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd argue the inverse. In my experience removing the gaps makes some symbols harder to read. Like distinguishing `==` and `===` without gaps is harder, though admittedly three-bar helps. Also, I find the ligatures I've tried a bit of an eye-sore, but that's just personal taste. What's a more serious concern is the "dumbness" mentioned in the article and the handling of ambiguous cases. To give my own example, in addi…

Well it is a matter of personal taste, isn’t it? For me it is just the opposite, the visual appearance of the ligatures burned itself itnto my brain in away that it is easier to spot when it is not there. Sometimes something not converting to a ligature can also be a hint (e.g. for a wrong hyphen beeing used etc)

> Sometimes something not converting to a ligature can also be a hint (e.g. for a wrong hyphen beeing used etc)

So what languages actually benefit from this? haskell, clojure but maybe not the usual C family ones?

Re: Ligatures in Programming Fonts: Hell No

#85

Post by BenjiWiebe »

beering wrote: post #3

Fonts like Fira Code are attractive for the same reason animated cursors are attractive - they give people a way to add fun little baubles to their working environment. No, they don't benefit your productivity and in many cases make it worse (e.g. confusing ligatures or buggy editor plugins) but decorations are by definition not of utility.

Decorations can't add utility? Does color-coding (tools|parts|areas) count?

Re: Ligatures in Programming Fonts: Hell No

#86

Post by viklove »

jake-low wrote: post #10

Used judiciously, ligatures can help make code more readable, not less. Consider JavaScript's == and ===, and their inverses != and !==. I personally find them difficult to visually distinguish on occasion (especially the negative forms). Fira Code [0] replaces them with two-bar and three-bar equals signs (something like =, ≠, ≡, and ≢, only wider; see the link for a screenshot). I personally find these easier to dis…

Why are you ever using == in JS?

Re: Ligatures in Programming Fonts: Hell No

#87

Post by aasasd »

Freak_NL wrote: post #46
pjc50 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps, but the automatic ligature substitution doesn't know that, and indeed in Times "Kauflete" is rendered with a ligature. Probably because native English speakers aren't used to accent or ligature rules. Anyway, I too agree with the author; if you want ≥ to appear on your screen, it should be in the source text as the UTF-8 bytes for U+2265 and the tooling should understand it. Programming is too fragile to all…

Why would using non-ASCII characters (I assume that is what you mean by Unicode characters) in a git commit message break anything sensible? It's meant to be human readable text, and defaults to UTF-8 (although you can use legacy encodings if you really must). Any git hook processing stuff would just look for stuff it does understand (like '([Cc]lose(s)?|[Ff]ix(es)?) #[0-9]+' or something similar) and ignore the rest…

Well, I dunno if you consider GitHub branch names circa 2015 sensible...

Re: Ligatures in Programming Fonts: Hell No

#88

Post by atoav »

type0 wrote: post #84
atoav wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well it is a matter of personal taste, isn’t it? For me it is just the opposite, the visual appearance of the ligatures burned itself itnto my brain in away that it is easier to spot when it is not there. Sometimes something not converting to a ligature can also be a hint (e.g. for a wrong hyphen beeing used etc)

> Sometimes something not converting to a ligature can also be a hint (e.g. for a wrong hyphen beeing used etc) So what languages actually benefit from this? haskell, clojure but maybe not the usual C family ones?

No idea, I use rust and python with it.

Re: Ligatures in Programming Fonts: Hell No

#89

Post by b2gills »

billpg wrote: post #40

Is Personally, I'd love a keyboard that had a ≤ key and a programming language that recognized that symbol.

In Perl6 
    say 4 ≤ 5; # True
    say 4 ≤ 4; # True
    say 4 ≤ 3; # False

    say 4
Specifically they are the exact same subroutine. (The normal operators are just subroutines with a special name.)

    say &infix:« ≤ »  =:=  &infix:«
(The =:= operator is basically the same as pointer equivalence.)

The line which creates this equivalence is the following:

    my constant &infix: := &infix:«
https://github.com/rakudo/rakudo/blob/b0dd44b006dc44da5695b2...
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