For files not intended to be hand-edited, it doesn't really matter what delimiters you use. It's not that difficult to code up char-escaping for csv. At Yahoo

For files not intended to be hand-edited, it doesn't really matter what delimiters you use. It's not that difficult to code up char-escaping for csv. At Yahoo, the typical delimiters for logs and whatnot were ctrl+a, ctrl+b, etc. It was slightly nicer than CSV, but only slightly. It was mostly nicer when manually inspecting files with columns that had embedded commas (that otherwise would have been escaped). The machines don't care, and for any interesting processing you'd often end up with escaping anyway.