In almost, if not every, programming language, pressing ctrl+c cancels your code. Why does it specifically have to be ctrl+c? So in other words, what made the developers of programming languages decide that ctrl+c has to be the combination to cancel the code and cause an error?
3 Answers
It doesn't "have to be" anything, it is a convention formed over a long history: Control-C, "C" for cancel, was I think first used in TOPS-10, a Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) mainframe operating system used in the late 1960s. The control key itself goes back much further, used on telegraphs and teletypewriters to key in non-printing characters. The idea of non-printing characters controlling a machine without sending a message has an even longer history, including procedure signs in Morse code, "NUL" and "DEL" in Baudot code, and other late 19th-century teleprinter standards and their devices.
Ctrl+C is not a programming language thing. It is an "interrupt" signal sent to the process executing.
Ctrl + C is an interrupt sent manually. You can do it programatically using signal.SIGINT:
process = subprocess.Popen(..)
process.send_signal(signal.SIGINT)
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