Consider the letter "a". There is no such problem of "keymapping policies"
or how to send it on telnet or ssh, because ASCII, in 1965, (or even before
that), standardized it. The last two characters in that acronym stand for
"Information Interchange", of course.
Anyway, ASCII's character 010 (^H) is called "BS", i.e., backspace. What's
so wrong with using that as the standard way to send a backspace? Is it
because someone decided that it would be cool to have help be summoned in
Emacs with a ^H? Next thing we know there'll be someone annoyed by the fact
that the Escape key sends ^[ and ruins his ability to map Control-[ to
something in Emacs (running on a tty), and we'll need to change the way Escape
is coded too?
Of course there are opposite arguments, with people calling their backspace
key a "rubout" and then claiming it is justified to use the ASCII rubout
character (0177, DEL) for it. Which makes this whole situation even uglier :(
-- Nadav Har'El | Monday, Sep 24 2001, 7 Tishri 5762 nyh@math.technion.ac.il |----------------------------------------- Phone: +972-53-245868, ICQ 13349191 |Hardware, n.: The parts of a computer http://nadav.harel.org.il |system that can be kicked. - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/