| I really don't think that's true. It's not tradition, it's practicality -- control characters are good because they are established, standardized, and work perfectly to solve an ongoing need. In-band signalling is inherently a bit of an architectural challenge. But the problem is solved. The entire internet is run on in-band signalling! We're going on 35 years for TCP/IP, and more like 50 for ASCII control chars. They work very, very well. Yes, Microsoft broke control character generation for users of their OS, but that's a compartmentalized failure, and easily avoided. The Ctrl+Shift GUI workaround in Windows (and copied in Linux) is not elegant. But any alternative without control chars would be a total loss of functionality. Ctrl+C being broken by Copy is a trivial example. There's a whole alphabet of control chars (in fact there are 32), and we all use more of them than most people realize[0]. Some have dedicated keys on the keyboard (backspace, return), but obviously not all of them. I use about a dozen control characters regularly. This is not unusual for someone who works closely with server operating systems. [0] I'm not sure how to gauge your knowledge of communication signalling or protocols, so I apologize if I'm being pedantic. It sounds like you have ideas about alternatives (and this is interesting to me), so I am curious about any specifics you can share or link to. |