On 9/6/2011 11:11 AM, Tres Seaver wrote:

FWIW, the RFC 20 (the ASCII spec) really really defines 'NUL'  as the
*name* of the \0 character, not just an "abbreviation used in tables":

  http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc20#section-5.2

As I read the text, the 2 or 3 capital letter *symbols* are abbreviations of of the names. Looking back up, I see
'''
4. Legend
4.1 Control Characters
   NUL Null                                DLE Data Link Escape (CC)
...
4.2 Graphic Characters
   Column/Row  Symbol      Name
   2/0         SP          Space (Normally Non-Printing)
   2/1         !           Exclamation Point
'''
'NUL' and 'SP' are *symbols* that have the names 'Null' and 'Space', just as the symbol '!' is named 'Exclamation Point'. They just happen to be digraphs and trigraphs composed of 2 or 3 characters.

I am sure that the symbol SP does not appear in the docs. The symbol 'LF' (for LineFeed) probably does not either. We just call it 'newline' or 'newline character' as that is how we use it.

--
Terry Jan Reedy

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