When the essay says "a literal tooth", does it really mean a literal calcium tooth from some animal's mouth?
The day Return became Enter (2023)
41–50 of 179 posts
Re: The day Return became Enter (2023)
#42When the essay says "a literal tooth", does it really mean a literal calcium tooth from some animal's mouth?
No those would be "literal canines", i.e. grammatical assistance dogs.
Re: The day Return became Enter (2023)
#43Older (pre-1980 or so?) Swedish texts call it vagnretur. Literally a wagon (or carriage; Swedish has only a single word for those things) return. Guess English picked up the word carriage from French at some point and that word ended up being used for carriage return rather that wagon return that would have made as much sense to me, but that might sound weird to native speakers.
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.
Carriage is another word for wagon (german Wagen, swedish vagn)
Re: The day Return became Enter (2023)
#44I 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.
Same for me. It had the smell of professionalism. Even more than for an Enter key I longed for the luxury of four distinct cursor keys.
Re: The day Return became Enter (2023)
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
As I understand it, "return" is a shorthand for "carriage return" - as on typewriters, going to a new line meant returning the carriage to its original (start of line) position.
Going to a new line is "line feed", hence the combo CR/LF.
I believe that it also has to do with the fact that at the time there no ‘screens’, only teletypers. So a new line is “return the carriage to the start” and “feed another line” (of paper) into the printer.
Re: The day Return became Enter (2023)
#46I was considering a purchase, seeing as it is such a wealth of information and history. However, there are expletives in chapter titles! That’s a no-no for a collection-worthy book.
Re: The day Return became Enter (2023)
#47Re: The day Return became Enter (2023)
#48I was considering a purchase, seeing as it is such a wealth of information and history. However, there are expletives in chapter titles! That’s a no-no for a collection-worthy book.
The Valley Virgins strike again
Re: The day Return became Enter (2023)
#49It'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 drivers for the particular terminal could have translated as required, and we would not need (in 2025!) to be specifying to git and elsewhere what to convert line endings to/from.
I know that back in the days of literal TTYs (ASR-33) where I cut my teeth, the BEL/BS/SP/CR/LF/FF etc characters were literally controlling a print head, but even then it didn't make much sense that we didn't have internal representation of what was needed (field separator, group separator, record separator) that was translated when doing actual I/O to a physical device.
Re: The day Return became Enter (2023)
#50I was considering a purchase, seeing as it is such a wealth of information and history. However, there are expletives in chapter titles! That’s a no-no for a collection-worthy book.
Are you 12?