this post was submitted on 31 Jul 2025
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[–] anton@piefed.blahaj.zone 25 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

My IDE says: '(', '+', '-', '.', ';', <operator>, '[' or '}' expected, got ';'
But the rust compiler explains

error: unknown start of token: \u{37e}  
help: Unicode character ';' (Greek Question Mark) looks like ';' (Semicolon), but it is not```   
what a killjoy.
[–] BuboScandiacus@mander.xyz 15 points 4 days ago (3 children)

But the rust compiler explains

If this is true then rust deserves all the praise it gets

[–] boonhet@sopuli.xyz 1 points 2 days ago

Rust's compiler is pretty much the reason the language gets so much praise. The borrow checking of course is the major reason, but it's great at hints too.

[–] anton@piefed.blahaj.zone 6 points 4 days ago

While the language can be hard to get used to, the error messages are mostly great.
But sometimes you can send it on a goose chase with impossible type inference.

[–] billwashere@lemmy.world 1 points 3 days ago (1 children)

This is pretty cool. But my question is if the compiler knows it’s basically the same thing visually, why doesn’t it treat it the same way as far as syntax and just make them functionally equivalent;

[–] arrowMace@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago

Because then logically extending this you end up with JavaScript, where "1"==1 and it's super hard to reason about what will/should happen

[–] arschflugkoerper@feddit.org 68 points 5 days ago (2 children)

vscode unfortunately highlights unexpected unicode characters

[–] Thedogdrinkscoffee@lemmy.ca 26 points 5 days ago (1 children)
[–] Matty_r@programming.dev 13 points 5 days ago

Harder to prank someone when it highlights it

[–] Trail@lemmy.world 7 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Ok, put it into an excel formula then.

[–] ChaoticNeutralCzech@feddit.org 1 points 3 hours ago

Non-native English speaker telling on themselves.
(Excel only uses semicolons instead of commas in locales where they would collide with the decimal comma)

[–] m_f@discuss.online 60 points 5 days ago (1 children)

; and ; respectively, in case anyone wants to see how it renders on their machine and is also lazy.

[–] squaresinger@lemmy.world 6 points 4 days ago

It must really suck to work as a Java developer in Greece.

[–] 30p87@feddit.org 26 points 5 days ago (1 children)

silently closes IntelliJ and vim, opens PyCharm

[–] anton@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 points 4 days ago

As if a white space sensitive language protects from this fuckery.

  • How many thin spaces are one level of indentation?
  • Will anyone notice a hair space?
  • Who can tell the difference between a space and a figure space? they are the same size in a mono spaced font
[–] lordnikon@lemmy.world 4 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Vscode might but what about llms asking for a friend

[–] frezik@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Since they're fundamentally predicting the next token, and there isn't a lot of training data out there that would actually do this, I wouldn't expect that LLMs are going to start putting in lookalike characters. They only lookalike to humans.

That said, you could probably poison their training datasets this way.

[–] lordnikon@lemmy.world 1 points 4 days ago

Yeah that was the idea get the llms to start using look alike characters to poison their outputs.

[–] Infernal_pizza@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Why do characters like this even exist? I've run into this before where I couldn't find a file I'd downloaded by searching for it. I remembered what folder it was in and checked it was still there, after playing around with the name for a bit I realised the "a" in the file name wasn't actually an a.

[–] frezik@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 points 4 days ago

Simple answer is that Unicode is a design by committee attempting to make every single human written language work. It's more complicated than it needs to be, but we also don't want to redo all the work it would take to replace it with something more sane. Especially KJC languages. Trying to get those three to agree on anything is for people who deal with frustration better than me.