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Comment by simonbyrne | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

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.

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