1. ASCII was engineered for bit‑level simplicity
- “This is by design, so that case conversion and folding is just a bit operation.” – kazinator
- “Also easy to see why Ctrl‑D works for exiting sessions.” – dveeden2
- “If Ctrl sets bit 6 to 0, and Shift sets bit 5 to 1, the logical extension is to use Ctrl‑Shift‑A to ! …” – unnah
2. Confusion between ASCII control codes and Unicode glyphs
- “Note on your Mac that the Option‑{ and Option‑} … produce quotes which are all distinct from the characters produced by your '/" key! They are Unicode characters not in ASCII.” – kazinator
- “What are you trying to achieve, none of those characters are printable, and definitely not going to show up on the web.” – voxelghost
- “If you want to use symbols for Mars and Venus for example, they are not in range(0,0x20).” – timonoko
3. Historical insights still inform modern programming
- “For whatever reason, there are extraordinarily few references that I come back to over and over, across the years and decades. This is one of them.” – taejavu
- “Tangentially related, there is much insight about Unix idioms to be gained from understanding the key layout of the terminal Bill Joy used to create vi.” – taejavu
- “Some of this elegance discussed from a programmatic point of view.” – pixelbeat__
These three threads—design intent, character‑set confusion, and the lasting relevance of early keyboard/ASCII design—dominate the discussion.