I doubt everyone will agree what the "optimal" delimited
format is. A few points:
- For a program, it doesn't matter what the delimiter is -
an "a" is as easy as a tab or a comma.
- For humans, it matters.
- I give much kudos to things that are debuggable with
vi and telnet.
- Tabs lose points, because they are not always easy to
distinguish from spaces. Furthermore, it's not uncommon
to configure editor to expand tabs to spaces.
- Printable punctuation characters are better than letters,
digits or control characters.
- The delimiter should be choosen in such a way it's not a
common character in the data, to avoid use of a backslash.
Don't use a dot as a delimiter when delimiting decimal numbers.
- I've preferences for colons (because important files in /etc
do so, semi-colons, dots, hyphens (all three because it's
natural) and "horizontal whitespace", that is, any sequence
of one or more spaces or tabs. Then you can make columns.
Abigail