“One suspects that some oddball keys were put on the PC keyboard (or to be more precise, included in the ASCII character set, most of which found its way onto the PC keyboard) because the developers figured they’d come in handy for something. On the whole that has turned out to be the case–programmers and developers have found a use for nearly every key on the keyboard, even if that use isn’t obvious to the general computing public.”
Very true, and often the uses we put such keys to are of the one-off variety, using an oddball character (or three) to solve a particular problem or come up with a very specific format, rather than the more general meanings that were discussed in the article.
For example, one common task is to split up a bunch of information into different parts, known as ‘delimiting’ in the programming world. For instance
4|Wilson|430 Random Road|$67.99|left-handedscrew|24|Yes
When you use an ‘oddball’ character like the pipe there’s almost no chance of confusion, but if you use a most standard character like the comma, someone might punch in a comma as part of their address and throw the whole system out of whack.
