I like Git commit messages. Used well, I think they’re one of the most powerful tools available to document a codebase over its lifetime. I’d like to illustrate that by showing you my favourite ever Git commit.
iirc, the issue wasn’t so much SHY being used for its intended purpose, as byte 0xAD no longer being available for use as a normal character.
Imagine getting a game map file from the 80s in which lots of (more than 224) characters were used as block graphics, and you have a matching font. You open the “text” file with the appropriate font, and notice gaps in what should be a grid because all of the 0xAD are missing.
Effectively ISO-8859 and similar have become so common that it’s really hard to convince any modern system to treat “text” bytes as not following some standard in which the 0xAD becomes non-printable.
iirc, the issue wasn’t so much SHY being used for its intended purpose, as byte 0xAD no longer being available for use as a normal character.
Imagine getting a game map file from the 80s in which lots of (more than 224) characters were used as block graphics, and you have a matching font. You open the “text” file with the appropriate font, and notice gaps in what should be a grid because all of the 0xAD are missing.
Effectively ISO-8859 and similar have become so common that it’s really hard to convince any modern system to treat “text” bytes as not following some standard in which the 0xAD becomes non-printable.