Re: interpreting ^Hs in text files

[Lee Sau Dan]

>>>>> "Dan" == Dan Kalikow <DrDan@Kalikow.com> writes:

    Dan> E.g., to print and underscore the word "the" the sequence of
    Dan> characters transmitted would be the^H^H^H___ where ^H was
    Dan> ctrl-H.

This would result  in "___" being displayed on  a dumber CRT terminal.
So, most people would rather  do it with "___^H^H^Hthe", which is more
fault-proof.  :)


    Dan>   It could also be used to strike through or
    Dan> obliterate a previously-typed letter.  It survived in that
    Dan> mode for awhile as "glass TTYs" supplanted paper terminals,
    Dan> but gradually fell into disuse in that mode.  

And some smarter CRT terminals actually emulated those effects to some
extent.


    Dan> Nowadays, I normally see such ^H stuff used as a "figure of
    Dan> net-speech" like this -- ===== Microsoft Windows is the most
    Dan> excellent^H^H^H^H^H^Hinsidious operating system known to
    Dan> exist today.  ===== HTH^H^H^HI don't care if this helps or
    Dan> not to tell you the truth :-)

But that's not a real Control-H.  It's 2 characters: ^ and H.  Anyway,
that's  the   convention  to   represent  a  Control-H   with  visible
characters.  How many people can  still appreciate those uses of ^ and
H?



-- 
Lee Sau Dan                     李守敦(Big5)                    ~{@nJX6X~}(HZ) 

E-mail: danlee@informatik.uni-freiburg.de
Home page: http://www.informatik.uni-freiburg.de/~danlee