The crazy thing about CSV files, commas are likely to be used in stuff you'd want to put in a CSV file.
"But Fluff," you say, "people already deal with that. Use colons or bar characters or tabs."
Well yes. People do that. But did you know ASCII (which now forms the first tiny chunk of unicode) has built in separator characters? ASCII 28 through 31; file, group, record, and unit separators. CSV was a mistake.
Thus ends another episode of Fluffpinions.
*looks at the boost and star numbers, whoa*
Some good points have been raised:
* as @kellerfuchs notices, these separators should work even with utf-8, the first 0-128 in unicode mirrors ascii (so 30 or 0x1E in both is the Record Separator).
* @bobstechsite points out that CSV generally allows escaping the comma, colon, etc. Through the use of other potential text characters, which means escaping the escape sequence to allow typing those. \, to type a comma, \\, if you actually want a backslash comma. Etc.
@vertigo reminds that ascii had other useful control characters for making out things like headers or the start and end of text that could have been usefully used but weren't.
* @SimonTesla points out a shortcoming. Tab and comma have dedicated keys on nearly all keyboards. FS, GS, RS, US don't. It would have been nice if they'd received key combos (ctrl or shift + something) early on to become defacto standards.
* or as @yakkoj suggests give them keys (anyone still regularly use SysRq?)
* @bhtooefr ponders whether this was all inherited from MS Basic. Hmm. Were csv files used on pre-hobby computer systems?
@LilFluff It looks more likely to be inherited from things like IBM Fortran in the early '70s, as well as the wide variety of home/office computer standards of the '75-'85 period.
Until the PC, everything IBM used EBCDIC instead of ASCII for legacy reasons, & EBCDIC doesn't have fs/gs/rs/us characters; & until they made 16-bit computers, the other big players Commodore, Apple, Atari, & Tandy used incompatible enough ASCII-like encodings.
The printed comma was a LCD.
