Richard Tobin wrote:
> >By my reading, none of the characters in the 
> >ranges 0-#x7, #xb, #xe-#x1a have any agreed-upon semantics de jure or de 
> >facto (let's go down to the mall and do some ).

By the way  is the ASCII character "Synchronous Idle".  I use it 
all the time.

>  The only reasonable use I've thought of for these characters is so
>  that you can directly refer to them *as characters*.  For example, if
>  I want to encode the termcap file in XML, it seems quite reasonable to
>  be able to refer to escape as .  

In the general case where you want to wrap up weird bits of binary 
gibberish to control hardware, why don't you just base64 it and not have 
to worry about which of them are magic C0 Controls and which aren't...

I'm sorry, these things are just on a different planet from respectable 
Unicode characters that aren't a bend-sinister by-blow of the flirtation 
of ASCII with Bell System 201 acoustic couplers.  And you know perfectly 
well that the people who want these aren't trying to exchange termcaps, 
they're trying to wrap binary gibberish in the trappings of XML 
interoperability.  Bah. -Tim


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