[ideamotor]

Commas are commonly used in text, too.

[susam]

Clearly they should have gone with BEL as the delimiter.

  printf "alice\007london\007uk\nbob\007paris\007france\n" > data.bsv

I'm hoping no reasonable person would ever use BEL as punctuation or decimal separator.

[dessimus]

If one was going to use a non-printable character as a delimiter, why wouldn't they use the literal record separator "\030"?

[kmoser]

On the off chance you're not being facetious, why not ASCII 0 as a delimiter? (This is a rhetorical question.)

[kevindamm]

...and excel macros

[LoganDark]

Sure, let's put quotation marks around all number values.

Oh wait.

lol