Re: Meta-Characters, Special Characters

[Joshua Cranmer <Pidgeot18@epenguin.zzn.com>]

xah@xahlee.org wrote:
> Will wrote:
> «a) <key> _or_ C-q <key>»
> 
> The C-q (or, pressing the Control key down then type q) is the
> keyboard shortcut to invoke the command quoted-insert.  It is a
> general a way to allow you to input any non-printable characters. This
> facility usually don't exist in other text editors. In popular text
> editor such as Microsoft Word or Mac's Application, you usally bring
> up a window showing all the special characters, then press a button to
> insert the char you want.

I would not go so far as to call Microsoft Word and Mac's Application 
"popular text editor [sic]"; I believe the proper term is "WYSIWYG word 
processors." Try programming in Word and then see if you would still 
claim that it is a text editor.

> « b) C-q C-[, C-q C-m, C-q C-j, C-q C-i»
> 
> When speaking of non-printable characters, the context is a character
> set standard. Implicitly, we are talking about ASCII, and this applies

Not technically. Implicitly, on any *NIX machine newer than, say, 2000, 
it implicitly refers to Utf-8, and Windows on English (or other 
Latin-based configuration, presumably) it would be ISO-8859-1 or Cp1252.

> « c) \e, \r, \n, \t »
> 
> This is a ad-hoc set of input and display representation for a few non-
> printable characters. This set is started by the motherfucking unix

Watch your language here!
> tech geeking morons, and by its free and speedy nature as cigarette
> given to children, today has spread to many languages (Perl, Java, C+
> +, C#, Python, JavaScript ...) and is a de facto standard. The damage
> is to such a degree that the general concept of unprintable
> characters, their representation, and their method of input, all
> treated in one systematic, simple way, are not in the consciousness of
> average industrial programers.

Far from it. Excusing your depressing lack of hyphens and incorrect 
spelling of simple words, the slash-character is neither ad-hoc nor 
damage-inducing. Because there are several non-standard ways to input 
control codes (not non-printable; HT prints something as much as ' ' 
does), the people who wrote the original C specification (not "unix tech 
geeking [sic]") decided to include such control codes as standard 
character references. The use of '\' as a control character makes 
perfect sense, as it tends to be rarely used in everyday stuff, and it 
already is a control character (think macros). Many of the languages 
cited -- although, interestingly enough, not C -- take as their source 
the B/CPL syntax, a.k.a. C syntax, to provide a familiar backdrop to new 
programmers.

Finally, I would like to address your idiotic usage of newsgroups. You 
are cross-posting a message about EMACS syntax to two (2) emacs 
newsgroups, a LISP group (I can sort of understand that), and a Perl and 
Java newsgroup. Well, at least you're cross-posting.