Re: [OT] What is DEL for?

From: John Cowan (jcowan@reutershealth.com)
Date: Wed Feb 21 2001 - 13:17:16 EST


Marco Cimarosti wrote:

> Which systems interpret 0x7F as "interrupt process"? I know that this would
> be 0x03 in DOS (^C), and 0x03, 0x04 or 0x1A in Unix (^C, ^D, and ^Z,
> respectively), but I know nothing about other systems, e.g. Macintosh.

Very long ago, in the Seventh Edition of Unix, the default interrupt
character was DEL, because it was (as Uwe writes) available on old
terminals without the need to hold down any shift key.
But even then most people changed it to ^C in actual practice.

> 1) What happens if emacs loads Doug Ewell's text file (I.e. a text file
> containing "ABC<del>DEF") and then saves it? Would the file's content be
> changed to "ABDEF"?

No. As part of a text file, DEL has no known significance on any
system.

-- 
There is / one art             || John Cowan <jcowan@reutershealth.com>
no more / no less              || http://www.reutershealth.com
to do / all things             || http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
with art- / lessness           \\ -- Piet Hein



This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jul 10 2001 - 17:21:19 EDT