> 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 separator

> 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.