Re: DHCP assistance required.

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Steve Searle:
>> The max-lease-time does not contain dashes but some sort of double
>> length dash.

Gene Heskett:
> Which is not available on USian keyboards.  WTH?

In this case it was a unicode minus sign (a mathematics symbol, not a
hyphen dash).

There are lots of characters that can be used that don't have a way of
being directly typed, so the keyboard's not really an issue.  They can
be typed using key combinations, or the author could have used a program
that replaces hyphens with dashes, under some circumstances:  Generally
it's done fairly sensibly (not when you just type a dash, but when you
type something like a double-dash sequence).  And this would normally be
a *good* thing (using proper punctuation in documentation, in the right
places).  But it should NOT be done in programming examples (the wrong
thing in the wrong place), where someone might directly use what you've
typed in a program.

I've often seen that sort of thing on webpages, where some authoring
help has /helpfully/ replaced computer quotes with proper quotes at the
wrong moment (in code sample snippets).  It's a very good thing,
normally, to write things correctly, and I strongly condemn the
inappropriate use of computer quotes (and other poor substitute
characters that look somewhat like what they're supposed to be, but
simply are *not*) in prose as childishly lame typing.  But, likewise,
I'll condemn the use of wrong punctuation in code samples.

I've seen this sort of thing, often enough, that I'll try and avoid
cutting and pasting code samples from webpages as much as possible.  Too
many errors creep in.

Someone will, no doubt, chime in and claim that crappy ASCII is good
enough for everyone, we don't need no UTF, and "screw you" for wanting
to do things right...  But I'll argue the case in an analogy that will
definitely ring true for you, Gene:  

You wouldn't put a 50 ohm BNC plug on a cable that connects to a 75 ohm
socket.  They look (almost) the same, but they're not.  *You* know why
it's wrong, and you know it'll cause you some sort of problems, even
when others who know nothing about them don't understand.

(Says Tim, who's camera once kept going off air on a live broadcast, at
the worst of times, because some dingbat had done just that.)

-- 
[tim@localhost ~]$ uname -r
2.6.27.12-78.2.8.fc9.i686

Don't send private replies to my address, the mailbox is ignored.  I
read messages from the public lists.



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