Welcome to Software Development on Codidact!
Will you help us build our independent community of developers helping developers? We're small and trying to grow. We welcome questions about all aspects of software development, from design to code to QA and more. Got questions? Got answers? Got code you'd like someone to review? Please join us.
Post History
The term escape sequence apparently dates back to the telegraph and pre-computer technology, according to wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escape_sequence. So I doubt there's an universally...
Answer
#1: Initial revision
by
Lundin
·
2020-08-17T10:22:31Z (over 3 years ago)
The term escape sequence apparently dates back to the telegraph and pre-computer technology, according to wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escape_sequence. So I doubt there's an universally relevant definition of the term. I would guess that the term, in the scope of computer science, originates from C, UNIX and AT&T. The C language (5.2.1) makes this formal definition of an escape sequence: > In a character constant or string literal, members of the execution character set shall be represented by corresponding members of the source character set or by _escape sequences_ consisting of the backslash `\` followed by one or more characters. This definition covers the use of escape sequences in C and various languages inherited from C, but not necessarily all uses of escape sequences in all languages.