> Can you link me to something that demonstrates that was intended rather than a quirk of the simple format?
It’s hard to find references of the intentions of the creators for a format this old, which evolved over decades of different software having similar input formats, starting in 1972. Most of these early descriptions accept both spaces and commas as separators, hinting at a manual input process.
The closest I can find is a 1983 reference¹ which indicated that the format “…contains no other control characters except the end-of-file character…”, which I take to mean that the format is easy to handle and process with other text-handling tools, but still, no definite reference of direct intent.
It does seem like it was made to be easy to visually parse but it still feels like the delimiter choice has been something of historical baggage (to the point where just changing the delimiter itself, such as TSV, makes it easier to parse).
It’s hard to find references of the intentions of the creators for a format this old, which evolved over decades of different software having similar input formats, starting in 1972. Most of these early descriptions accept both spaces and commas as separators, hinting at a manual input process.
The closest I can find is a 1983 reference¹ which indicated that the format “…contains no other control characters except the end-of-file character…”, which I take to mean that the format is easy to handle and process with other text-handling tools, but still, no definite reference of direct intent.
https://archive.org/stream/bitsavers_osborneexeutiveRef1983_...