alt Hacker NewsImho ascii wasted over 20 of its precious 128 values on control characters nobody ever needs (except perhaps the first few years of its lifetime) and could easily have had degree symbol, pilcrow sign, paragraph symbol, forward tick and other useful symbols instead :)
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bee_rider • today at 2:38 PM
On top of the control symbols being useful, providing those symbols would have reduced the motivation for Unicode, right?
ASCII did us all the favor of hitting a good stopping point and leaving the “infinity” solution to the future.
zygentoma • today at 1:43 PM
I started using the separator symbols (file, group, record, unit separator, ascii 60-63 ... though mostly the last two) for CSV like data to store in a database. Not looking back!
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y42 • today at 1:45 PM
only that would have broken the whole thing back in the days ;)
Smaller, 6-bit code pages existed before and after that. They did not even have space for upper and lower case letters, but had control characters. Those codes directly moved the paper, switched to next punch card or cut the punched tape on the receiving end, so you would want them if you ever had to send more than a single line of text (or a block of data), which most users did.
Even smaller 5-bit Baudot code had already had special characters to shift between two sets and discard the previous character. Murray code, used for typewriter-based devices, introduced CR and LF, so they were quite frequently needed in way more than few years.