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Comment by cruise02 | Hacker News Reader

> Replace a semicolon (;) with a greek question mark (;) in your friend's C# code and watch them pull their hair out over the syntax error

I'm not sure how frustrating this would be. Wouldn't most people just delete the character immediately and type a new one?

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I don't know about C# compilers, but gcc gives me two errors, "stray ‘\315’ in program" and "stray ‘\276’ in program", which I suppose are the two utf-8 bytes. Rust says, "unknown start of token: \u{37e}". Either way, you get a pretty strong clue that there's a funny character present.

If faced with a linter error, I don't typically delete the marked stuff, write it anew and hope fingers crossed that the error would be gone. I would try to make sense of the message, how it applies, and what the error is. At some point though, I definitely would pull my hair over a greek question mark.

Only one character is going to be marked in this case, not a whole line or section of code. Deleting it and retyping it costs one second. I guess I've seen more than my fair share of encoding issues. I used to tutor at a university, so students were constantly coming in with code they'd copy/pasted out of their assignment (usually a Word doc) or from a web site.

I think that's a great argument. If someone mails the code, I hope to have the cleverness to suspect the encoding. However, I thought about a code repository or similar where this may be an issue, but most often is not. And I have seen some code where a wrong language character did not provoke a reasonable error, but some arbitrary parser error that went off in another line altogether (not necessarily C#).

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