Comment by deathanatos
9 years ago
I've sshed into Linux systems just to get that particular version of the man page. It's a shame that OS X doesn't have it.
Like the author, it blew my mind when I realized that all the Ctrl+? keys were assigned their letters due to a single bit flip.
vim also does this; this is why nul is ^@.
If you don't have a Linux system at hand, you can get the manual page online: http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man7/ascii.7.html
OSX doesn't have it? http://imgur.com/xFRNPbo
That's exactly what mine looks like too. Compare to the Linux version: http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man7/ascii.7.html
The Linux version has two columns; ever wonder escape (0x1b) visualizes as ^[? because it's a single bit off the actual character "["; all the control characters are; they're visualized by essentially flipping a single bit, and displaying ^ + that letter. This was the point of TFA.
The author's four column layout also makes the 1-bit difference between upper and lower case ASCII readily apparent, which the Linux man page regrettably does not.
I assume the author meant "in a 32-character grouping", however man ascii(7) on my Linuxes show it in 64-character groups, so... shrug