> with no restrictions on the text in fields or the need to try and escape characters.
Maybe I'm missing something, but wouldn't it still need escaping for those ASCII separator characters (or alternatively, a restriction for the stored text not to have them)?
It's true that having to deal with escaping much less often (since the ASCII separator characters are rarer than commas/quotes) would be convenient for manual reading/writing, but I feel that's canceled out by the characters being hard to type/see (likely the reason why they're rare) - and it wouldn't necessarily save on writer/parser code complexity.
Maybe I'm missing something, but wouldn't it still need escaping for those ASCII separator characters (or alternatively, a restriction for the stored text not to have them)?
It's true that having to deal with escaping much less often (since the ASCII separator characters are rarer than commas/quotes) would be convenient for manual reading/writing, but I feel that's canceled out by the characters being hard to type/see (likely the reason why they're rare) - and it wouldn't necessarily save on writer/parser code complexity.