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As the inventor of the escape sequence, I caution any reader to forget the current text. It is a much more complicated and significant topic than is apparent here. I'll try to put in a new one in about 2 months
Bob Bemer bob@bobbemer.com
-- 64.57.225.199, 2003-08-24T20:54:23
Is it safe to say that, if the term were to be applied to natural languages, then in English, the vowel sound written as "oo" would be termed an escape sequence? I mean, if you consider that, on a keyboard, a shift key press along with another key yields another character, and that can be deemed a hardware escape sequence.
--Jerome Potts (talk) 05:14, 10 June 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Escape sequences can be more broadly defined as any change in the interpretation of characters following the escape flag. The oldest reference to an escape sequence is the shift-out/shift-in pair of characters. Made popular by the teletypewriter, the concept was first used to represent lowercase characters as the 5-bit Baudot code did not have enough unique patterns to represent UPPERCASE, LOWERCASE, numbers and punctuation. Later the FIGS and LTRS keys were translated to the current ASCII SO and SI characters. The interpretation of the characters became popular as a way to trigger alternate character sets. HP terminals such as the early 2640 used not only SO and SI for character sets, but used the actual ASCII escape character (ESC or hex 1B) to begin a sequence of one or more characters. Ranging from display character changes (enhancements) such as dim, underline, blinking, to XY positioning of the cursor on the screen, to complete graphics control of the screen. These codes were the beginning of the most pervasive printer language in the industry: PCL
Inshell programming, it is common for the backslash character "\" to change the standard meaning of the next character. For example, the double quote " character can have one meaning by itself but \" removes the normal meaning. The \n sequence is translated by shells and other text filters such as awk and printf as the newline character. Pooderbill (talk) 00:59, 2 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]
This page is really lacking examples of escape sequences. I found my way here from the Control character page which has the following:
I expected to see more examples, or a link to examples for escape sequences. The Control character page has a better explanation of Escape sequences than this page, and it doesn't even belong there as much as here. I'd like to propose an Examples section of common escape sequences that a person might usually run into (i.e. color escape sequences or cursor movement sequences). It would help make sense of this article and what it's talking about. Martinemde (talk) 07:47, 22 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
To get rid of that tag, the topic should rely upon reliable sources for both the ideas and the supporting details. TEDickey (talk) 19:24, 10 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
As written, the topic is tying together (aka research) information from various sources (none of which is comprehensive...) with the implication that the same (or similar) term is related. To do that, you need a few (more than one) reliable sources which cover the topic. The guidance in the links at the top of the page should make this clear TEDickey (talk) 10:04, 11 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
