Another advantage to using alt-backspace over ctrl-w is that the former has the same semantics as alt-b. ctrl-w considers a word to be anything surrounded by sp

Another advantage to using alt-backspace over ctrl-w is that the former has the same semantics as alt-b. ctrl-w considers a word to be anything surrounded by spaces, whereas alt-b and alt-backspace consider a word to be any consecutive string of word characters.