Quoting Vincent Lefevre (vinc...@vinc17.net): > On 2015-08-19 16:33:09 -0500, David Wright wrote: > > Quoting Thomas Schmitt (scdbac...@gmx.net): > > > But the typographical purpose of NO-BREAK SPACE is to look > > > like space without inviting an automatic line break. > > > So making it look not like space would be absurd. > > > > But shell input is not a typographical context. Most source code > > isn't, except in literals. Documents generally are because they are > > displayed/printed. > > The point is that the terminal cannot do the difference between > a NBSP coming from shell input and a NBSP coming from a displayed > document. So, it should render a NBSP exactly like a normal space. > And it is up to the application (the shell, an editor in some > mode, etc.) to render NBSP in a special way if needed.
Why not? Let's substitute TAB TAB for NBSP in your comment. My terminal happily swallows TAB TAB with cat > file, and renders it correctly with cat file. But when I type TAB TAB as shell input, I get "Display all 3402 possibilities? (y or n)". It seems to be able to "do the difference" in this case. So my point is, "rendering NBSP in a special way *is* needed" (because NBSP is not treated as firstclass whitespace and, it appears, never can be). Cheers, David.