Basement Chronicles

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"Living in your head
Without anything to numb you"

So, I guess we need to know why there's a new name.

An 'escape character', is, as I'm sure you've probably guessed, a programming term. In every programming language that I have come across, and probably most that exist, there's at least one definite problem they all suffer from: Every piece of code has to be written in plain text. But what if your code is dealing with text itself (say, if you want to print something)? How does the computer differentiate between your programming code and the text that the code is dealing with?

Well, one solution is to keep the text part in quotes. For instance, to assign a string of characters to a variable in C, you have to do the following:

char[] c = "This is my string.";

Notice the quotes? But then another problem comes up. What if the string you're dealing with has quotes in it? You end up with something like this:

char[] c = "And so she was like, "Pshaw."";

Now the computer gets confused. Which quotes is it supposed to pay attention to? Are you trying to assign two strings to a single variable? The computer isn't that crafty. So how do we tell the computer that we want quotes in our string, but still use quotes to define the string? The simple answer: escape characters. If we put a in front of the quotations, like so:

char[] c = "And so she was like, "Pshaw."";

...then the computer, when its processing the string, gets told that "Hey, the next character is somehow special."

I say 'special' because you can 'escape' more than just the quote character. For instance " " stands for a new line, " " stands for a tab, "" stands for the null character, the list goes on. Sometimes the list is absolutely huge. Sometimes different escape characters mean different things. Sometimes an escape character in one place will mean something different than an escape character in another.

So that's the technical definition. Special characters that are meant to flag the computer to do something different. Chances are, you aren't fascinated by textual manipulation, and so the explanation didn't do a lot for you. I'm not all that fanatical about it either. It's a pain in the ass, and a ubiquitous one at that.

However, I like the idea. From a computing perspective, I like that despite being somewhat inelegant, its simplicity speaks to the original theoretical Turing machines on which modern computing is based. If you really, really wanted to, you could develop an entire computing system with the concept of escape characters. In fact, that's not all that far from how things are now. I'll save that for another day, though.

As for it being analagous to life, it speaks to my discontent. It is rare in our daily lives that we come across something truly special. Something that stands on its own, unmarred by our cynicisms and fears. Simultaneously atomic and everywhere. Or, even if its just something mundane like a quotation mark, then it is something different than alphanumerics.

So then why not just name it 'Escape', and drop the stupid programming stuff. That's what I'm talking about, right? That I'm unhappy about things, and I want out, or an out, something different. That I think that by some drastic change that things will become suddenly happy and shiny and interesting.

Of that I am guilty, to an extent. But I also admit that it is possible that such drastic events are improbable. Or they might not exist at all. Or they don't exist in the miraculously perfect way I've dreamed them to be. Chances are, they are short-lived, and few and far between. And who's to say that once such an event has occured, then the next won't be just the same as before? Or that I'll even have the opportunity or presence of mind to notice it?

I understand that life isn't just an endless stream of characters and symbols. I understand that people are not (exactly) Turing machines. Nothing is that simple. But I'm not sure it is much more complicated, either.

So, I still don't know what I'll write about from week to week. But I think writing in terms of 'Escape Characters', rather than just writing from a basement, gives me a better model to work with for what kinds of things to I want to write about. Whatever keeps me writing, right?