Jeffrey Hutzelman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > [..T]he _common_ convention is to use a backslash followed by the > value of the octet as an unsigned integer represented by exactly > three _octal_ digits. This is the syntax used by programming > languages like C and perl. For example, ASCII ESC (0x1b) is > represented as \033, not \027.
Actually, the convention used in C and Perl is to use \0, followed by zero, one, or two octal digits (leaving some values of octets without representation). I personally think it's a poor convention as it uses varying number of digits, so it becomes difficult to represent, say, the NUL character followed by the digit "1". (I still use the convention in cases when it is familiar to most from documentation, e.g., "\015\012" in Perl.) A reasonable convention is hexadecimal: backslash, followed by the letter x, followed by exactly two hexadecimal digits; e.g., "\x1b" for ESC. This notation, while looking familiar, has differences from both Perl and C hex notations: in Perl, you can have just a single hex digit following ``backslash x'', while in C you can have arbitrarily many. With the common conventions so unnecessarily complex and difficult to use, it doesn't surprise me that the document authors chose to use a nonstandard one. I'd have chosen a different one (hex with exactly two digits, which won't deceive C and Perl programmers in the same way "\027" meant for ESC would), but that's just a minor typographic convention. -- Stanislav Shalunov http://www.internet2.edu/~shalunov/ This message is designed to be viewed with 0.06479891g of NaCl. _______________________________________________ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf