Re: Suggested character set policy for the IETF

["Martin J. Duerst" <mduerst@ifi.unizh.ch>]

On Tue, 1 Jul 1997, Walter Ian Kaye wrote:

> Here is my own personal definition (which I came up with about a week ago):
> 
>   A "control" character is one which can be interpreted as an instruction
>   to treat the characters which follow it in a different way than they
>   would be treated if they did not follow that character.

Not that useful, probably. First, many control characters don't
really treat following characters in a different way, unless you
consider the fact that they appear on a different line, for example,
as "treating in a different way". But then you would have to
attribute a "control" function to each and every character because
otherwise, they all will have to appear on top of each other :-).
Also, the property of introducing state, implied in your definition,
is something that may be in some cases unavoidable (e.g. complex
BIDI cases), but is not in general desired, just to the contrary.

Regards,	Martin.