Docstrings considered too complicated

[David Robinow]

On Wed, Mar 3, 2010 at 1:01 PM, Ed Keith <e_d_k at yahoo.com> wrote:
> --- On Wed, 3/3/10, D'Arcy J.M. Cain  wrote:
>
>> They needed a way to tell where the end of the information
>> was.  Why
>> they used ^Z (SUB - Substitute) instead of ^C (ETX - End of
>> TeXt) or
>> even ^D (EOT - End Of Transmission) is anyone's guess.
>
> That has always puzzled me to. ETX and EOT were well established, why no use one of them? I'd love to know what they were thinking.

There were numerous incompatible and primitive transfer protocols in
those days. They probably wanted to pick something that was NOT well
established so it would pass through without, for example, causing End
Of Transmission.