alt Hacker NewsA little off topic but amidst a lot of discussion of UTF-8 and its ASCII compatibility property I'm going to mention my one gripe with ASCII, something I never see anyone talking about, something I've never talked about before: The damn 0x7f character. Such an annoying anomaly in every conceivable way. It would be much better if it was some other proper printable punctuation or punctuation adjacent character. A copyright character. Or a pi character or just about anything other than what it already is. I have been programming and studying packet dumps long enough that I can basically convert hex to ASCII and vice versa in my head but I still recoil at this anomalous character (DELETE? is that what I should call it?) every time.
Much better in every way except the one that mattered most: being able to correct punching errors in a paper tape without starting over.
I don't know if you have ever had to use White-Out to correct typing errors on a typewriter that lacked the ability natively, but before White-Out, the only option was to start typing the letter again, from the beginning.
0x7f was White-Out for punched paper tape: it allowed you to strike out an incorrectly punched character so that the message, when it was sent, would print correctly. ASCII inherited it from the Baudot–Murray code.
It's been obsolete since people started punching their tapes on computers instead of Teletypes and Flexowriters, so around 01975, and maybe before; I don't know if there was a paper-tape equivalent of a duplicating keypunch, but that would seem to eliminate the need for the delete character. Certainly TECO and cheap microcomputers did.