The point of text-based formats is that you can edit them in a text editor by hand trivially, if typing the character is nontrivial, then it entirely defeats the point (that's also why USV ads very little value IMHO).
You can actually type a bunch of ASCII control characters very easily on a keyboard. Look at an ASCII table with 32 characters per column (I like this one[1]). The key combo for a control character is Ctrl + the letter on the same row as the control character. So:
BELL Ctrl-G
RECORD SEPARATOR Ctrl-^
UNIT SEPARATOR Ctrl-_
ESCAPE Ctrl-[
You can think of the Ctrl key as clearing the two most-significant bits of the letter's ASCII code. Not all key combos are supported in all environments. Notepad++ doesn't support Ctrl-] (GROUP SEPARATOR) at all, but does support e.g. SHIFT OUT as Ctrl-Shift-N, for instance. The Windows CMD.EXE command line supports many combinations (but not UNIT SEPARATOR, unfortunately), displaying them as e.g. ^[ or ^G in the console.
If I need a table or Google to figure out how to type something, that's not "very easily"
If you need to train your employees on that, it's not "very easily".
"Very easily" is when I can take any family member who's seen a computer in their life, give them a keyboard and they can figure it out on their own without Google in 2 seconds (like csv).
What I mean is that a simple key combination is easier to use than an Alt code or having to copy and paste from another document. The ASCII table stuff is just fun trivia. "Press Ctrl-_ to insert a column separator" isn't any harder than "Press Ctrl-S to save" or "Press Ctrl-T to open a new browser tab". It's definitely easier than letting your hypothetical family member reinvent character escapes on their own the moment they encounter an address that has an extra comma in it. :-)
What’s the key to enter the euro symbol? That means you can’t use it in a text editor?
There is no perfect solution, but I’d rather open a text file in a decent editor than having to deal with the escaping hell that is CSV.
They could have chosen the pipe character “|” at least, but the comma is the thousand separator in many languages (number formatting is kind of important for tabular data, if you ask me) and also, you know, general prose.
And it was there even before we got euro coins in our hands (I know this because I'm still using my first (mechanical) keyboard that I got with my first own PC in 2001: and there is a “€” symbol on it)
Well some of us do. There's this interesting effect where many people perceive the limitations on their current tools to be equivalent to limitations on their abstract abilities. If they don't know how to do it, it's impossible.
I think that's exactly the point that the parent poster is trying to make by example? Just because we don't have good tooling today for using ASCII delimiter characters, doesn't mean it's impossible -- just like typing the euro symbol on an american keyboard
It doesn't mean it's impossible, but it's definitely cumbersome. Any non English people who has had to type in their native language from an american keyboard can tell you.
Oh yes certainly. And I think that when you're deep into creation it can be really really hard to remember that experience, and so recently I'm trying to find ways to help pull back the curtain for folks.
Where's the key on my keyboard yo make one?
The point of text-based formats is that you can edit them in a text editor by hand trivially, if typing the character is nontrivial, then it entirely defeats the point (that's also why USV ads very little value IMHO).