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Comment by joosters | Hacker News Reader

Interesting web page! Despite many years of using ASCII and knowing some of the more common control codes, I had never even thought about what the other mysterious 0-31 codes were defined as.

Something that the page doesn't mention is that CR+LF were originally two separate control codes because the action of returning the print head to the left hand side would take too long with a standard line printer. Therefore, separating the actions into two codes meant that the printer would not miss out any printable characters.

(At least, I read that somewhere on the internet and assumed it was true!)

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It's more likely that it's because they are two separate physical actions (returning the head to the left, and advancing the paper one line). They could be used independently: You could print a line in bold, for instance, by issuing a CR without an LF and then printing the same line again.

A carriage-return operation takes much longer than a single character, or even two or three. It doesn't make sense to issue two characters just to take up time. The printers always had to have some internal buffer memory (and handshaking over the communication lines to say when the buffer is full) in order not to lose any characters.

> You could print a line in bold, for instance, by issuing a CR without an LF and then printing the same line again.

True, but mildly redundant: "overprinting" was explicitly the purpose of 0x08 backspace (which had nothing, originally, to do with 0x7F deletion.)

To overprint a whole line using 0x08, you'd need one 0x08 for each character in the line. So an N-character line overprinted that way would take N3 characters in memory.

Using CR, you'd need N2 + 1 characters.

Even ignoring additional time needed to send those extra characters, it also was a lot faster than those control-H's, and (I guess) caused way less wear on your printer.

That presumes you're going like A^HAB^HB; you could just emit foo, and then strlen(foo) ^Hs.

I wonder how precise the backspacing was - how many times could you print a character and backspace before the head had drifted by a full point?

I had a daisey wheel printer in the late '80s that had a few characters of buffer. I had to know that it took quite some time for every CR. It would do the niave bold of the full line with CR, but if it got X^HX it would hit the X and then slide the head over a bit to the right to smear and get the bold effect, which looked much better. It was not uncommon and that's another reason a lot code did it the BS way for OS capable HC devices.

Ugh, wish I had checked this after sending it, now it's too late to edit. I think the gist of it is clear, but to make sure:

Overprinted with 0x08: requires 3N characters

Overprinted with CR: requires 2N+1 characters

"You could print a line in bold, for instance, by issuing a CR without an LF and then printing the same line again."

Last I checked, this still works even on laser printers (at least on a LaserJet), when sending data to it as plain text. It's not actually printing over itself, but it knows to make the repeated characters bold.

less (among other unix tools) does this too (but you have to do one character, bs and the character again). There are more, like _, bs, character underlines (like cat there is ul that handles this specifically). If your terminal supports os (overstrike) in it's terminal description it handles that natively.

Yes. Separate Carriage Return & Line Feed date back to Murray's 1901 variant of Baudot encoding, and ASCII was created to standardize the various teletype encodings out there so it inherited this way of doing things.

In the days of mechanical line printers CR by itself allowed overprinting for special effects like underlining and bold.

Depends on your platform. Even today a Unix/Linux line ending is almost always just LF.

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newline

Unix = LF Mac = CR DOS = CRLF

The DOS line endings are inherited from previous systems, and while they precisely convey carriage and paper movement of a printer it can be a pain to deal with today.

Somewhat ironic that this detail of how teletypewriters work was not carried over into Unix whereas every intricacy of how video terminals worked still is with us today.

Unix = LF Mac = CR DOS = CRLF

Please add to that list also

HTTP = CRLF

http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec5.html

However, I still have to see I single webserver that does not accept LF alone instead of CRLF.

Only old Macs. They switched to POSIX-style LF with OS X.

True, but since Mac OSX is already known by most people to be *nix based, at least this audience, I felt like that might just add to confusion. There are certainly other OSs like BeOS that I didn't mention, in part because I didn't think they added to the discussion, and also while having fond memories of BeOS, I honestly don't remember what it used. I want to say it was LF, but I no longer remember.

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