freebsd vs. netbsd

[Polytropon]

On Thu, 11 Jun 2020 15:19:40 +0200, Ralf Mardorf via freebsd-questions wrote:
> On Thu, 11 Jun 2020 14:50:46 +0200, Polytropon wrote:
> >If I wish to use "..." instead of "…", and I use "those"
> >quotes instead of “those”, then I do so for a good reason.
> >I don't have to explain or justify that reason.
> 
> In this case at least the meaning didn't change, but unfortunately it
> isn't always like that.

Correct - as I said, it's not a big problem here, but the
"reasoning beneath it" could be.



> If text writing software automatically detects what kind of " to use,
> it could be useful and if unwanted, we notice it and can disable it.

The mail composer window today, in many MUAs, resembles
a word processing window, and it incorporates many of the
microformatting aspects (uses HTML), utilizes spellcheck,
or "is the same" in another way. However this does not
stop the user (!) from disabling features that he does
not want.

The "smartness" can easily be brought to a point where
a human decision would be desired; imagine the situation
when I do this:
	- foo
	- bar
	- baz
	- tabs are great
		+ pups
		+ furz
		+ gak
	- meow
	- point
which is, I embed a list in a paragraph. It's okay to
collapse the paragraph into a single line when replying,
but what about the bullet points? Hmmm... So "leave it
as it is" is probably the better choice here.

Not all automatisms are helpful. People will always be
smarter than their machinery. Hopefully.



> But I experienced that a MUA editor showed the wanted signes when
> editing and while sending, it changed the signs. It was visible after
> sending, not before sending.

So _that_ is what I would call a problem: Intransparent
automatic behaviour. If I writteled liek that than the
programme ist not suposed to change it and the value
is -150, not –150 in va_start(char *format, …) and then
printf(“Hello world!\n“); (yes, that is the dreaded
greek question mark ;, not a semicolon ;), and that
wasn't a smiley, so don't replace anything, and in
Germany with translation use druckf(„Hallo Welt!“).
A sentence ends with a full stop. :-)




-- 
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...