User talk:Spoodles

It seems that “delimiter” has come to be synonymous with “separator”, but this is not how I learned it. Back when I was taking computer science classes, delimiters were used to mark the start and end of something. For example, a quotation uses delimiters. If you see something like, "it fell from the sky", the quoted text is delimited. A double-quote marks the beginning, and another double-quote marks the end. So delimiters set the boundaries of the thing being delimited.

If this were still true, you could not call a file of comma-separated values format (or CSV) a comma-delimited file. Technically, I would argue it is not comma-delimited, it is comma-separated. By contrast, files that conform to a text markup language, like SGML or XML, are delimited in that the beginning and end of chunks of text are marked by start and end tags.

I don’t mean to be pedantic, but this is delimited. Spoodles (talk) 20:57, 29 January 2009 (UTC)