On Wed, Jan 24, 2001 at 10:28:27AM -0600, Karl Fogel wrote:
> Branko =?ISO-8859-2?Q?=C8ibej?= <brane@xbc.nu> writes:
> > > Log:
> > > Use underscore instead of hyphen to signify no-ops in status and
> > > update. The dash looked too much like a minus sign, as though it were
> > > negating whatever was to its right.
> >
> > $ ls -l
> > -rw-r--r-- foo bar 13 15 Jan 00:00 bla
> >
> > "Oh, I'm not allowed to read or write bla."
> >
> > :-)
> >
> > Seriously, I wonder if your argument is valid. Personally I'd prefer a
> > dash to an underscore, and it's much more visible, especially when you
> > can expect to have an uppercase letter in the next line.
>
> Can you give it a try the underscore way first and see if you get used
> to it?
>
> The reason I ask for this is: Ben and I recently gave a demo of the
> command-line client interactive test suite to a roomful of engineers,
> and the dashes actually *did* cause confusion for people, including
> even -- momentarily -- myself! So I think there's real evidence that
> people will interpret it as a minus sign.
I tend to agree with Karl. The "ls" modes have multiple '-' characters, so
we don't view them the same way as "-M".
Cheers,
-g
--
Greg Stein, http://www.lyra.org/
Received on Sat Oct 21 14:36:19 2006