language agnostic - Is there any (opposite of newline) char?

Question

Was wondering if we could print from right to left, bottom to top... I got this thought when trying to write a program to print the following square (for an input 'n', here n=4 )

1  2  3  4
12 13 14 5
11 16 15 6 
10 9  8  7

This could be solved many ways, by storing into a 2D array and printing the array... (Any language: Perl, C, C++, Java).

Answer 1

The long answer is that you can do whatever the terminal supports. There are many kinds of terminals (or “character output devices”), many of them support cursor motions. (You can see the Termcap Library project to create a picture what different terminal types do.) There is a terminal command for moving up a line, so esentially yes, you should be able to do that. After poking in the termcap database, I came up with the following:

$ printf "
"; printf 'e[A'; echo Foo
Foo

In other words, the e[A string has a non-zero chance to get you one line up. On some terminals :)