5 ms·

This is one of those great ideas that sadly one needs experience to realize are really bad ideas. Every new generation of programmers has to relearn it. It's a

This is one of those great ideas that sadly one needs experience to realize are really bad ideas. Every new generation of programmers has to relearn it. It's a bad idea because ASCII already includes dedicated characters for field separator, record separator and so on. These could easily be made displayable in a text editor if you wanted just as you can display newlines as ↲. Anyone who invents a format that involves using normal printable characters as delimiters and escaping them when you need them, is, I feel very confident in saying, grotesquely and malevolently incompetent and should be barred from writing software for life. CSV, JSON, XML, YAML, all guilty.

spion 6y ago
how do you write them though
- teddyh 6y ago
  Ctrl-\, Ctrl-], Ctrl-^ and Ctrl-_ for file, group, record and unit separator, respectively. However, your tty driver, terminal or program are all likely to eat them or munge them. Also, virtually nothing actually uses these characters for these purposes.
  - goatinaboat 6y ago
    virtually nothing actually uses these characters for these purposes. Right. Which is why we have all these hilarious escaping and interpolation problems. Any why programmers will never be taken seriously by real engineers. It's like we have cement mixed and ready to go but we decide to go and forage for mud instead and think that makes us cleverer than the cement guys.
    - spion 6y ago
      > your tty driver, terminal or program are all likely to eat them or munge them Maybe that has something to do with this?
aasasd 6y ago
The obvious first step toward the brighter future is to refrain from using any and all software that utilizes the malevolent formats you mentioned. Doing otherwise would mean simply being untrue to one's own conscience and word.
tjalfi 6y ago
> It's a bad idea because ASCII already includes dedicated characters for field separator, record separator and so on. ASCII is over 60 years old and separators haven't caught on yet; what's different now? > These could easily be made displayable in a text editor if you wanted just as you can display newlines as ↲. Can you name a common text editor with support for ASCII separators? It's a lot easier to use delimiters and escaping then change every text editor in the world. > Anyone who invents a format that involves using normal printable characters as delimiters and escaping them when you need them, is, I feel very confident in saying, grotesquely and malevolently incompetent and should be barred from writing software for life. CSV, JSON, XML, YAML, all guilty. All of the formats you rant about are widely used, well supported, and easy to edit with a text editor - none of these are true of ASCII separators. People chose formats they can edit today instead of formats they might be able to edit in the future. All of these formats have some issues but none of the designers were incompetent.
erik_seaberg 6y ago
US-ASCII only has four information separators, and I believe they can only be used in a four-layer schema with no recursion, sort of like CSV (if your keyboard didn’t have a comma or quote or return key). When you need to pass an object with records of fields inside a field you’re out of luck, and everyone has to agree on quoting or encoding or escaping again. I think SGML (roll your own delimiters and nesting) was pretty close to the Right Thing,™ but ISO has the specs locked down so everyone had a second-hand understanding of it.

spion 6y ago

how do you write them though

teddyh 6y ago
Ctrl-\, Ctrl-], Ctrl-^ and Ctrl-_ for file, group, record and unit separator, respectively. However, your tty driver, terminal or program are all likely to eat them or munge them. Also, virtually nothing actually uses these characters for these purposes.
- goatinaboat 6y ago
  virtually nothing actually uses these characters for these purposes. Right. Which is why we have all these hilarious escaping and interpolation problems. Any why programmers will never be taken seriously by real engineers. It's like we have cement mixed and ready to go but we decide to go and forage for mud instead and think that makes us cleverer than the cement guys.
  - spion 6y ago
    > your tty driver, terminal or program are all likely to eat them or munge them Maybe that has something to do with this?

aasasd 6y ago

The obvious first step toward the brighter future is to refrain from using any and all software that utilizes the malevolent formats you mentioned. Doing otherwise would mean simply being untrue to one's own conscience and word.

tjalfi 6y ago

> It's a bad idea because ASCII already includes dedicated characters for field separator, record separator and so on. ASCII is over 60 years old and separators haven't caught on yet; what's different now? > These could easily be made displayable in a text editor if you wanted just as you can display newlines as ↲. Can you name a common text editor with support for ASCII separators? It's a lot easier to use delimiters and escaping then change every text editor in the world. > Anyone who invents a format that involves using normal printable characters as delimiters and escaping them when you need them, is, I feel very confident in saying, grotesquely and malevolently incompetent and should be barred from writing software for life. CSV, JSON, XML, YAML, all guilty. All of the formats you rant about are widely used, well supported, and easy to edit with a text editor - none of these are true of ASCII separators. People chose formats they can edit today instead of formats they might be able to edit in the future. All of these formats have some issues but none of the designers were incompetent.

erik_seaberg 6y ago

US-ASCII only has four information separators, and I believe they can only be used in a four-layer schema with no recursion, sort of like CSV (if your keyboard didn’t have a comma or quote or return key). When you need to pass an object with records of fields inside a field you’re out of luck, and everyone has to agree on quoting or encoding or escaping again. I think SGML (roll your own delimiters and nesting) was pretty close to the Right Thing,™ but ISO has the specs locked down so everyone had a second-hand understanding of it.