Why You Need to Understand ASCII Control Characters
My Experience in Understanding ASCII Control Characters
here's ASCII Characters
as scientific programer, I wasn't too familiar with it for the first 10 years coding with Mathematica, in 1990s. Then from 1998 to ~2007, i did java, perl, python, php. Still don't know ascii control sequence much, except line feed (aka newline), form feed, horizontal tab, carriage return.
But as you code more or touch low level issues, you have to know it well. e.g. even in JavaScript golang
why is ascii important? because when you do networking, protocols, terminal, IO, file encoding, or even syntax detail of programing languages, understanding ASCII control sequences becomes critical.
here's some issues related to ASCII.
note, ASCII is part of Unicode. In utf8 encoding, any file in ASCII encoding is 100% same with utf8, if the file does not contain non-ascii chars such as ∑ α → 😂
note that, the need to understand ASCII is one thing, meanwhile, there are lots programers, typically mono-lang American, who have phobia towards any non-ascii character. They insist, that programing language source code should not contain ANY char that keyboard cannot type directly.
〔see Problems of Symbol Congestion in Computer Languages; ASCII Jam vs Unicode〕
emacs dev Alan Mackenzie is one such person, and many others in emacs dev list. They, resulted a damage to emacs around 2016. So that now emacs function doc string has the complexity of going thru transformation, instead of “curly quote” directly.