From: Antoine Leca (Antoine10646@leca-marti.org)
Date: Wed Jun 08 2005 - 09:00:02 CDT
On Tuesday, June 7th, 2005 17:31Z Matthias-Christian Ott wrote:
> For what are the controll sequences in ascii (except \n & \t) useful?
The writers of the standard ECMA-48 (ISO/IEC 6429, and the related ANSI
X3.64) have written about 70 pages trying to provide answers to this very
question. You can read their prose one click away from
http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/standards/Ecma-048.htm.
Perhaps part of the propositions could be seen as useless these days (and in
fact a pair of them probably have always being useless.) However, I think
that a superficious reading of this standard should show you that there are
a variety of intended uses for control characters, depending of the
contexts.
There is also the accompanying ECMA-35 (ISO/IEC 2022), at
http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/standards/Ecma-035.htm, which
provide some additional answers (particularly for SI, SO and the related
ones). More relevant could be ISO 1745:1975
http://www.iso.org/iso/fr/CatalogueDetailPage.CatalogueDetail?CSNUMBER=6365,
change /fr/ to /en/ if you need), but I must confess I never have the
oportunity to actually read it.
Antoine
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Jun 08 2005 - 09:02:58 CDT