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I think there is a deeper question: "record separator" and "unit separator" chars are a good idea, but why are they invisible? I agree that in the current form, they are mostly unusable.

What was the idea of the designers how they should be used?

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ASCII was created in the 1960s. That's around the time when the industry wasn't really sure if all files were just going to be a stream of bytes that were completely up to programs to interpret, or if it was the OS's responsibility to enforce a database-like structure on all disk-like I/O.

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