I think it'd be just as handy to use their real names: \b == backspace (go back one space), and \r == carriage return (return to the beginning of the line). Originally, these were from the terminal printer days and were just directives to the print head to do exactly that. Carriage returns (returning the carriage to the beginning of the line) were not intrinsically linked to new lines, so we get different characters for these activities.