OT: Vertical Tab was Re: indendation question

[Erik Max Francis]

Peter Hansen wrote:

> I have or once had an absolutely excellent book on serial
> communications
> programming in C (probably called that, too) which made an excellent
> case
> for replacing all the myriad ways in which we represent end-of-line
> with
> a simple \v, since it is used effectively for no other purpose at this
> point.

I wish I had a copy of the ASCII Standard; it's possible that the
Standard itself has some constraints on the usage of VT that would
disallow this (I don't know for sure, though).

The ISO-8859-1 control characters (not used in ISO/IEC 8859-1 -- gets
confusing, doesn't it?) reserves another 32 codes for control characters
from 0x80 to 0x9f (inclusive); included is NEL Next Line (0x85), which
presumably was intended as a character to resolve the issue once and for
all but which of course never caught on.  The Unicode Standard does talk
about NEL as an acceptable end-of-line indicator in exchange, though.

-- 
 __ Erik Max Francis && max at alcyone.com && http://www.alcyone.com/max/
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\__/ I dream things that never were and say, "Why not?"
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