Talk:Caret notation

How does one generate  under  ? --Abdull 15:47, 8 April 2007 (UTC)

History of this convention?
Is there some historical reason why the caret character is used in this convention? E.g. was the caret near the control key on some widespread early terminal, for example? Please add this info if you know! -- 77.7.168.159 (talk) 10:40, 21 July 2010 (UTC)


 * I suspect it has something to do with the use of ^ for XOR.Spitzak (talk) 18:38, 21 July 2010 (UTC)


 * It dates back at least to TOPS-10; see, for example, Book 3 of the PDP-10 Reference Handbook, section 5.1.1.1 (they presumably were using one of the "earlier versions of ASCII" referred to in ASCII that "used the up-arrow instead of the caret"). Guy Harris (talk) 11:33, 28 November 2014 (UTC)

Opening paragraph is misleading and long-winded
The opening paragraph drones on and on about about "why" caret notation is mapped out the way it is. Stating that it's because a certain character value "comes before" another is misleading. The various other "reasons" given in that paragraph are also just false or irrelevant.

The actual reason caret notation is mapped the way it is, is simply because every mapped character is the result of `c | 0x40` (or `c + 64` if you prefer). It can be done in 1 machine instruction, without any special cases. The explanation in the article should mirror this, not go on and on about some long-winded nonsense. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.6.177.154 (talk) 22:41, 31 August 2018 (UTC)

Ambiguities
How is the ambiguity between ^^ being Ctrl-^ and ^^ being two ^ characters dealt with? In the sequence "foo^^^bar" is that 3x'^' or 1x'^' and 1x'^^' or 1x'^^' and 1x'^' ?

GSTrans notation doesn't have this ambiguity, the escape character itself is escaped, || is '|'. "foo|||bar" is 'f','o','o','|','|b','a','r'.

Jgharston (talk) 05:54, 2 July 2020 (UTC)


 * Caret notation is usually used only for output only. Have never heard of code reading it.Spitzak (talk) 19:18, 2 July 2020 (UTC)


 * What about the human reading it? How does the human know what "^^" is the output from? Is the outputting system outputting 0x5e,0x5e or 0x1e ? Is "^^^" the output from 0x5e,0x5e,0x5e or 0x1e,0x5e or 0x5e,0x1e ? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Jgharston (talk • contribs) 21:23, 16 December 2020 (UTC)
 * "What about the human reading it?" They're forced to guess from context.  So it goes....
 * "Is the outputting system outputting 0x5e,0x5e or 0x1e" It's outputting 0x5e, 0x5e if, for example, some program that displays most input control characters in caret notation reads 0x1e and prints it as "^^". Guy Harris (talk) 22:05, 16 December 2020 (UTC)

Adding Backspace (^W/^H) to the See also section
Moving it over here to stop the revert war. User:Spitzak, you wrote:

"me>> Backspace describes the meaning of,, and." you> I agree this is not needed, why those control characters and not others? The full list already exists in linked-to articles

If you follow the links ou referred to to (ASCII control characters and C0 and C1 control codes), you’ll see they lead to the same article which for some reason says ^W is “end of transmission block” and ^U is "Negative response to a sender, such as a detected error."

The reason I mentioned ^W and ^H explicitly is because they have special meaning in human communication, as described in the page I linked to (Backspace). For better or for worse, this page (Caret notation) is what comes up when searching for caret-related notation and as I mentioned earlier in response to User:Guy Harris, "One purpose of "See also" links is to enable readers to explore tangentially related topics" (MOS:SEEALSO).

I see that you two contributed a lot to this article and I appreciate your effort to share your knowledge on the topic. Nevertheless, please consider the points made at Revert only when necessary:


 * Reverting tends to be hostile, making editing Wikipedia unpleasant. Sometimes this provokes a reciprocal hostility of re-reversion
 * For a reversion to be appropriate, the reverted edit must actually make the article worse...authors and others with past involvement in an article have a natural prejudice in favor of the status quo, so your finding that the article was better before might just be a result of that

I fully acknowledge your perspective that technically ^W is "just" another example of caret notation, and its function in various computer systems is not, strictly speaking, on-topic for a description of notation itself. I'm open to hearing your suggestions as to how to make Backspace better discoverable for someone searching for "caret W" on a $search_engine asqueella (talk) 22:28, 17 January 2024 (UTC)


 * I see. It might be better to add this info directly to caret notation, as this leakage into popular culture is certainly an aspect of it. I thought you were linking to the fact that Ctrl+H is backspace. Spitzak (talk) 23:27, 17 January 2024 (UTC)
 * Perhaps, but I'm not sure how to incorporate it into the article itself, while adding a mention to "See also" was quite straightforward. --asqueella (talk) 10:40, 18 January 2024 (UTC)


 * For better or for worse, this page (Caret notation) is what comes up when searching for caret-related notation If somebdy explicitly looks for something with "caret" and "notation", that's not surprising. But ^H and ^W goes to sections of backspace that discuss their uses on input; the section on ^H is the one that discusses the use of ^H in text as an indication of deletion describing it as examples of "epanorthosis" - that page also mentions ^H and ^W as examples of that, referring to them as "caret-control characters" and linking to caret notation.
 * So are people likely to find themselves at caret notation if they're trying to figure out what "that certainly makes sense^Wno sense at all" means, or are they more likely to end up on backspace - especially if they're unfamiliar with the term "caret notation" and don't think of looking for something about the caret character? Guy Harris (talk) 08:55, 18 January 2024 (UTC)
 * (I fixed ^U to go to Backspace, which discusses ^U, just as ^W goes to that section.) Guy Harris (talk) 08:57, 18 January 2024 (UTC)
 * Good point! Problem is many web search engines don't work well for special characters, so after failing with ^W (yahoo, google, brave), the next natural thing to do is search for "caret W", which brings up this page... --asqueella (talk) 10:40, 18 January 2024 (UTC)