On Mon, 30 Mar 2009, Rhialto wrote:
On Sun 29 Mar 2009 at 21:58:34 +0000, Valeriy E. Ushakov wrote: The specific order (underscore, backspace, letter) was chosen so that it also works on glass terminals that don't overprint but just replace: you see the letter when it is printed last (in the other order you'd only see the underscore which is far less useful).
It's also simple to generate (another reason).By the way, that ordering wouldn't work well with (at least some) hardcopy terminals. I once wrote (more than one...) utility to convert the single-backspace sequences to minimize the carriage movement and make it run a lot faster, e.g.,
_^Ha_^Hb_^Hc
___^H^H^Habc
(it was more general than that, but that's an example).
--
Thomas E. Dickey
http://invisible-island.net
ftp://invisible-island.net