Comment by Brian_K_White
Comment by Brian_K_White 2 months ago
The problem with those ascii values is editors don't display them and there are no keyboard keys to type them.
The reason csv exists is because you can actually see and type all parts of it, on anything, any platform, any hardware, any software, any age, even a mechanical typewriter, even a pencil. That is not merely nice, it's essntially priceless, infinitely, incalculably valuable. The utility outweighs the problems as big as they absolutely are. Actually the same is true for json, yaml, xml...
> The problem with those ascii values is editors don't display them and there are no keyboard keys to type them.
Did you read my post? Like, every word of it? Being able to type a control sequence is not particularly useful for ephemeral data in a message-passing between programs context. It's absolutely important for persistent, editable data. It seems like more of a feature to me to use these special characters for special contexts and not have escaping typeable characters be load-bearing.
Further, my editor seems to print control characters just fine, though entering them would be a bit of a pain and the behavior is likely configurable.