Re: [PATCH] [[:blank:]] only matches on SPC and TAB

[Sebastian Gniazdowski <sgniazdowski@gmail.com>]

On 14 May 2018 at 14:34, Stephane Chazelas <stephane.chazelas@gmail.com> wrote:
> I don't think many people complained when multi-byte support was
> added and English people were starting to have their [[:alpha:]]
> match on Greek or Korean letters in addition to English ones
> (fair enough as "alpha" means the first letter of the Greek
> alphabet).

This is a very interesting point. Think bank-systems. I think no one
ever predicted that control code of deployed programs will be
influenced from outside. The [[:alpha:]] case should find its way to
books on computer science as an example of something unbelievable. The
same as changing libc and fopen() to return NULL also when, say ...,
disk is near-full. I wonder how this compares to y2k situation hehe.
That said, I think that what is hidden behind those "upgrades" of
standard libraries, is a motivation to do a 1-time bungee jump,
risking breaking bones, but hoping to fix past mistakes. The past
(ignoring of non-ascii strings) had to haunt enough people so that
this happened.

> --
> Stephane