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GrantSolar

Ironically, this is the first time I've heard of `\v`

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Old codes are full of gems. ASCII has field record separator for instance. Free CSV.

Oh, would that we had used that to begin with instead of the ghastly quote convention!

Don't ask, it's only hurting.

Sorry, but I actually am using RS, FS in the equivalent of a CSV import. It's ASCII, folks.

Computing is full of crappy re-inventions of things that already existed. For instance, many old style terminals could do fields and validation of those fields.

The world is spiraling on itself so much it's crazy. Accepting it is one big step toward happiness.

Talking about old terminals. I worked at a tax office, around 2005, the web was getting trendy, so old AS400 applications were on the way out. I had to use them just before they were replaced by whatever webapp was coming. It was one of the best user experience I had. That old system was so on-point. It's funny because AFAIK terminal code had close to no structure, it parsed fixed patterns on screen buffers, pretty archaic. But, the software was hyper ergonomic, responsive, simple and solid. It did infer/complete lots of fields, find non trivial issues and suggest corrections. I could barely imagine the amount of regression that were about to hit the employees when the html/js version would land, it did make me really sad.

<rant/>

I really hate the move to webapp everything, at my workplace we used to have this great terminal interface as a server database, it was easy to script with, automate with, and use. Need a server? Just query it in terminal for data.

Now we have this shite webapp that only runs properly in IE, it's unusable for any sort of mass-querying, and it takes a good 10 or so clicks on buttons that resize themselves to find out all the info about a server, whereas the terminal program was just "ServerLookup X".

I too. I'm not against newness, not even some regression. You gain things, you may lose some, but right now it seems no gain only pain. All so that you may evolve it, so that it's css3-cute. Nowadays at least you'll have responsive layouts to avoid mobile/desktop redundancy. But in 2005 there was none of that.

I remember an article in Wired about an (old?) company still using AS400 or punchcard in their accounting branch and resisting the migration. Can't find it at the moment though :(.

  > For instance, many old style terminals could do fields

And often had a next-field key distinct from the tab key.

I wonder why these are no longer used. There is the obvious visibility issue, but tab delimited files are still quite common. I wonder if it was because languages (particularly C, and all languages which copy the C convention) don't provide escape characters for them?

Cynical me would say it was used a lot at first, but then ASCII became something of the past, and some company doing data work started using commas, it got trendy and ASCII RS went into the closet.

Wikipedia suggest CSV was already around at the time of punched cards, I guess people would prefer commas over some obscure RS code.

Ascii came around in 1963, so possibly csv predates ascii?

Wikipedia quote:

Comma-separated values is a data format that pre-dates personal computers by more than a decade: the IBM Fortran (level G) compiler under OS/360 supported them in 1967.

CSV isn't something computer specific, it's basic human grammar, CSV probably just put a tag on a common practice.

Visible delimiters are easier to understand when folks look at the files later -- they are essentially self-documenting. Whitespace takes more work to decode.

Overloading whitespace is fine for machines, but it doesn't improve human readability. In The days when memory and storage were small and runtime compression would crush throughput saving a byte here or there made sense in the mainstream. But these days? The critical reasons to use text tend to be either hitting an existing interface or human readability, and with 1GB of RAM about the price of a Happy Meal, the risks of invisible textual complexity probably outweigh any benefit.

Reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C0_and_C1_control_codes now and getting this urge to write a pure ASCII editor, haha.. Seriously, it's actually suitable for more advanced editing than modern day "pure text" editors.

SOH + STX to set a document title. FF for page breaks. DLE to allow embedded (binary/uninterpreted) data like images and avoid printing garbage. FS, GS, RS, US to support tables.

I find it interesting that this coincidentally works complementary to syntax like Markdown. :p

I tried playing around with something like that.

http://jimkeener.com/posts/ADF

I did complicate it a little by trying to insert field metadata into the file.

SOH is also important in the FIX protocol --- and the fact that FIX relies on ASCII arcana causes security problems.

I think the article is right: eliminate \v.

4 level list separators, one could almost have an ascii filesystem/db.

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