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To: brian@shift.lan.awfulhak.org
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        brian@awfulhak.demon.co.uk, brian@utell.co.uk,
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Subject: Re: Backspace = ^H 
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Tue, 25 Mar 1997 14:04:45 +0000"
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Date: Tue, 25 Mar 1997 16:11:39 +0100
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> > > So that emacs' help system can work.  Why would reversing them
> > > contradict their names ?
> > Because man 7 ascii tells me that:
> > 
> > 	010 bs   011 ht   012 nl   013 vt   014 np   015 cr   016 so   017 si
> > 	    ..
> > 	170  x   171  y   172  z   173  {   174  |   175  }   176  ~   177 del
> > 	                                                                   ...
> > 
> > which maps nicely to their ^ variants...  Please, just because
> > their is this one editor which gets it wrong doesn't mean there is
> > a reason to change the basic character encoding of the rest of the
> > system.  Put this (for xemacs, dunno about emacs)
> 
> Yep - I guess you're right.  So my problem remains: why is the "erase"
> character set to ^? by default ?

This is more of a religious issue than anything else. There are lots
of system which use the Delete character (177) to delete a character :-)
I prefer a system where ^h is help in emacs, and the arrow key above the
enter key is mapped to Delete, which deletes characters.

Please don't go around and claim that there is 'one editor that gets
it wrong', and using ^h to delete characters is more logical than using
Delete. Both of those characters are equally logical.

Steinar Haug, Nethelp consulting, sthaug@nethelp.no