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Comment by fsckboy | Hacker News Reader

> It even has a bell character. This has no reason to be built into our text format.

it's not built into our text format (our being us,-unix-before-unicode). It's built into the terminal.

The file format is 8-bit clean as it should be, any other values are going to have to be out-of-band. The unix stream format follows the file format, with the exception of

the terminal format (and the comms format) is 7-bit ascii with varying amounts of ANSI control, but that's on you, you bought the terminal...

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ASCII characters roughly below 20 are largely control character. Backspace is a control character. Carriage return is technically a control character. There are CSV like form field characters. Escape is another non-printable ASCII character.

ANSI escape sequences do also include control codes but there’s plenty in ASCII too.

Frankly, you only need to spend 30 seconds looking at an ASCII table to see this.

Source: I’m an author of an alt $SHELL

sorry, but ASCII is ANSI, so the ASCII control characters are ANSI characters, and I didn't even mention "ANSI's escape sequences" which are an escape from ASCII's single character meanings, but use the ASCII ESC character as it was intended, to escape within the ASCII framework. ANSI makes people think about controlling devices and ASCII also controls devices (not to mention bidirectional comms) so I think it's a good way to think of it.

Since we've all read the docs, but a bunch of you are laboring under misimpressions, I'm trying to say things in an unusual but truthful way to be the iceberg to the titanic of misunderstanding that thinks the BEL character doesn't belong in ANSI's ASCII protocol

I'm not sure what you mean: ASCII text encoding is full of controls characters, most of them being only historical and not used by anything, including terminals.

ASCII, an ANSI code, includes the concept "information interchange" in the name, i.e. it is also a communication protocol, and also a terminal device control, inasmuch as it is also a character set. That's why OP was making a mistake claiming that "BEL" doesn't belong in there.

ANSI's escape sequences came later to control more functions for glass teletypes.

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