Re: The joy of FORTRAN

John Ames <commodorejohn@gmail.com> writes:

On Fri, 27 Sep 2024 21:49:43 -0400
"186282@ud0s4.net" <186283@ud0s4.net> wrote:
 

Revelation DB system used ascii-255 as the record
mark, 254 as the field marks and worked backwards
from there, thus allowing about 127 levels of
sub-sub values though nobody EVER used THAT many.

 
It's always struck me as funny that nobody *ever* seems to use the
ASCII control characters that already exist for record demarcation for
that purpose; aside from CR/LF/tab/NUL, and BEL/SUB/ESC in interactive-
terminal contexts, the whole 0x00-0x1F range might as well not exist.
Not that it'd be a conspicuously *good* idea, but I've always harbored
an impish desire to devise a format that makes use of the rest in some
way that maps relatively logically to the original intent/description...
 

Burroughs used FS, GS, RS and US (in both EBCDIC and ASCII) for various
related purposes (most significantly to delimit fields in the block-mode
terminals).