[ntp:questions] Strange refid

Brian Utterback brian.utterback at oracle.com
Tue Nov 12 18:19:00 UTC 2013


On 11/12/2013 1:02 PM, Gary Johnson wrote:
> On 2013-11-12, John Hasler wrote:
>> Brian Utterback writes:
>>> However, it begs the question of why somebody thought that printing
>>> "M-" before characters with the high order bit turned on would be a
>>> good idea.
>> ASCII characters with the high bit turned on are control characters.
> No, they're not.  Control characters are those with all but the
> lowest five bits set to 0.
>
>> "M-" is a common notation for control as in "M-J" for "control-J".
> M-J is 0xCA whereas Ctrl-J is 0x0A.
>
> Regards,
> Gary
>

Okay, I can see why someone might have "thought it was a good idea at 
the time", but it clearly fails as a long term strategy since it is only 
obvious after it is explained. And particularly considering that this 
feature would never be exercised except through a bug.

Brian.


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