Re: terminology

From: John Cowan (jcowan@reutershealth.com)
Date: Thu May 02 2002 - 17:31:24 EDT


Murray Sargent scripsit:

> "Sentinel" is fairly commonly used in computer science and program code for data delimiters. "Delimiter" is also a good word for this (I use it in RichEdit code), but one may well use "delimiter" to describe a quote character (like U+0022), whereas I've never seen "sentinel" used for a quote. As such "sentinel" seems less ambiguous for Unicode code points like U+FDD0 - U+FDEF. It would be interesting to know if anyone is using these Unicode "noncharacters" for purposes other than sentinels.

We could use the IBM slang term "zigamorph" for these codepoints. This
was applied to EBCDIC FF, and I tried to popularize extending to U+FFFF,
but it really could apply just fine to all the others as well.

U+FFFE is probably not used as a sentinel, but rather as a "swap bytes"
indicator.

-- 
John Cowan <jcowan@reutershealth.com>     http://www.reutershealth.com
I amar prestar aen, han mathon ne nen,    http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
han mathon ne chae, a han noston ne 'wilith.  --Galadriel, _LOTR:FOTR_



This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Thu May 02 2002 - 18:18:51 EDT