Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The day Return became Enter (2023)

aresluna.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 179 posts

Re: The day Return became Enter (2023)

#61

Post by adastra22 »

amszmidt wrote: post #39
adastra22 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would wagon return make sense? I don’t see the connection. A carriage is something that holds things for transport. A wagon is specifically the wheeled thing that is pulled along. Typewriters aren’t wheeled transports.

A carriage is a wagon that transports people, not "things", a carriage are also usually wheeled, just like wagons. In this case, one reason why "wagon return" might have made more sense is because there is a wagon that holds the platen of the typewriter.

It is a standard engineering term, e.g. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_carriage

Re: The day Return became Enter (2023)

#62

Post by kimixa »

Doxin wrote: post #54
kimixa wrote: post #27

I remember back in the day I had a demo disc where one of the installers (I think it was Theme Park?) had a prompt of "Press return to quit, press enter to continue". And that confused single-digit-years me for a surprising amount of time, as there wasn't, to my mind, a real difference between the two keys. Even then I assume it was really a troll as much as anything else.

Perhaps a confused translation of escape/enter happening there? I don't think there's many (if any) PCs with both a return key and an enter key.

No, I definitely remember it behaving differently if I pressed "return" (right of "#" on the keyboard) vs "enter" (on the numpad).

EDIT: In the US I guess that's right of "'"? Below backspace, above the right shift.

The reason I remember is it took me quite a while to actually run the damn thing :P

Re: The day Return became Enter (2023)

#63

Post by fecal_henge »

rswail wrote: post #49

It's a damn shame that the control characters for "Field Separator" (FS ASCII 28 decimal) and "Record Separator" (RS ASCII 30 decimal) weren't used instead of TAB and CR/LF. Then the whole CRLF vs CR vs LF for line endings in files would have been totally avoided, with CR returning the print-head/cursor to the left-most position (right-most on R-L languages) and LF literally moving the print-head/cursor down. The dri…

Also CSV files would not exist.

Re: The day Return became Enter (2023)

#64

Post by 3036e4 »

amszmidt wrote: post #39
adastra22 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would wagon return make sense? I don’t see the connection. A carriage is something that holds things for transport. A wagon is specifically the wheeled thing that is pulled along. Typewriters aren’t wheeled transports.

A carriage is a wagon that transports people, not "things", a carriage are also usually wheeled, just like wagons. In this case, one reason why "wagon return" might have made more sense is because there is a wagon that holds the platen of the typewriter.

I said "as much sense", not "more". I am just not used to a language that makes the distinction.

Doesn't seem perfectly consistent in English either. When there is a "wagon train" in a Western movie it is often full of people in wagons. Seems like wagon vs carriage is a bit more complex than just if it carries people or not?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covered_wagon

Re: The day Return became Enter (2023)

#65

Post by comex »

jama211 wrote: post #59
aldto wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And Fn+Return can be used for Enter if the keyboard doesn't have a Num Pad, for the few Applications that use it.

Huh, TIL. I do wonder though what programs are looking so specifically for the exact Enter code.

This post has a few examples:

https://daringfireball.net/2020/07/return_and_enter

Re: The day Return became Enter (2023)

#66

Post by rhizome »

rswail wrote: post #52
strken wrote: post #41

When the essay says "a literal tooth", does it really mean a literal calcium tooth from some animal's mouth?

There was a metal tooth that the shift lock engaged on the shift key below it, effectively "locking" the key carriage in place in the "shifted" position (caps lock for alphabetic characters, the "special" characters for the numerics). To release it, you either pressed the shift key down, or pressed the shift lock again to "unlock" the shift. No animals were harmed by the implementation of the tooth :)

It's a latch.

Re: The day Return became Enter (2023)

#67

Post by paffdragon »

rswail wrote: post #49

It's a damn shame that the control characters for "Field Separator" (FS ASCII 28 decimal) and "Record Separator" (RS ASCII 30 decimal) weren't used instead of TAB and CR/LF. Then the whole CRLF vs CR vs LF for line endings in files would have been totally avoided, with CR returning the print-head/cursor to the left-most position (right-most on R-L languages) and LF literally moving the print-head/cursor down. The dri…

Wouldn't we still need a "Line Separator" character so we can include line breaks in fields and records for formatting purposes?

Re: The day Return became Enter (2023)

#68

Post by unwind »

wpm wrote: post #24
jasperry wrote: post #5

I remember being mildly intrigued as a kid when I started seeing PCs with the Enter key where my C64 had Return. It's ironic that, though we haven't seen a Return key for a long time, the down-left arrow symbol still used on many keyboards represents the motion of a carriage return. I guess there's no other symbol that would convey the meaning of Enter as well.

Every Apple keyboard, even the iPhone I’m typing this comment on, has had a Return key. Only the Num Pad has an Enter key on Apple’s keyboards.

Wow, throwback to running MacScheme (I think) on the university's Macs in a computer lab in the mid-90s. It interpreted main keyboard Return differently from numpad Enter, which to me (coming from the Amiga) was very confusing.

If I recall correctly, only Return caused an evaluation attempt, while Enter merely added a line break for readability.

Re: The day Return became Enter (2023)

#69

Post by Animats »

rswail wrote: post #49

It's a damn shame that the control characters for "Field Separator" (FS ASCII 28 decimal) and "Record Separator" (RS ASCII 30 decimal) weren't used instead of TAB and CR/LF. Then the whole CRLF vs CR vs LF for line endings in files would have been totally avoided, with CR returning the print-head/cursor to the left-most position (right-most on R-L languages) and LF literally moving the print-head/cursor down. The dri…

> It's a damn shame that the control characters for "Field Separator" (FS ASCII 28 decimal) and "Record Separator" (RS ASCII 30 decimal) weren't used instead of TAB and CR/LF.

No, it's not.

That stuff is left over from 1940s-1950s schemes for polled multidrop teletype machines - multiple stations on one wire, taking turns. The idea was that you punched paper tapes locally and then put them into a reader. When it was your station's turn, the central machine would send a polling sequence of a few characters, the selected reader would start up, read one message into the upstream system, then stop. In the other direction, the central station could send a turn-on code to any machine, print a message, then turn it off. Only one machine at a time could run. Those control characters were the delimiters for that process. All of this was mechanical, done by a unit called the "stunt box", which you can look up if really bored.

RS-485 is a descendant of that technology, still used in some industrial control systems.

(I used to restore antique Teletypes for fun, and had a functional Telegraph Office at steampunk conventions for about seven years.)

Re: The day Return became Enter (2023)

#70

Post by rswail »

paffdragon wrote: post #67
rswail wrote: post #49

It's a damn shame that the control characters for "Field Separator" (FS ASCII 28 decimal) and "Record Separator" (RS ASCII 30 decimal) weren't used instead of TAB and CR/LF. Then the whole CRLF vs CR vs LF for line endings in files would have been totally avoided, with CR returning the print-head/cursor to the left-most position (right-most on R-L languages) and LF literally moving the print-head/cursor down. The dri…

Wouldn't we still need a "Line Separator" character so we can include line breaks in fields and records for formatting purposes?

RS separates logical "lines" or there is "Group Separator", but for internal line separators in a multi-line text field, the CR and LF characters could be used, because they have "standard" meanings for text:

CR: move next character position to position 1 horizontally LF: move next character position to vertically below current character position, potentially inserting SP characters.

So a combination of CR/LF, or LF/CR would have the effect of "New Line".

Post reply on HN