OT: Vertical Tab was Re: indendation question

[Peter Hansen]

Erik Max Francis wrote:
> 
> Samuel Walters wrote:
> 
> > What exactly *is* a vertical tab?  I don't think I've ever seen it on
> > a
> > keyboard or used in the wild.  I think I may have seen it on the
> > keybindings for a mainframe terminal I once used, but I didn't really
> > dig
> > too deep because, as far as operating the mainframe was concerned, I
> > was a
> > well trained monkey who could check and restart failed jobs.
> 
> It's a whitespace control character, whose precise meaning is, as far as
> I know, left to the implementation.  

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.

The idea will probably get as far as the Dvorak keyboard has, unfortunately...

-Peter